Devouring One´s Own Tail

Vojtěch Kolman Tomáš Murár (eds.) Devouring One’s Own Tail Autopoiesis in Perspective KAROLINUM Devouring One’s Own Tail Autopoiesis in Perspective Vojtěch Kolman Tomáš Murár (eds.) Inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s theories on social systems, this book examines the concept of autopoiesis, or self-creation, as it relates to society and culture. Approaching the concept from a variety of fi elds—philosophy, philology, aesthetics, linguistics, archaeology, and religious and media studies—the contributors present the products of humanity as self-referential, self-sustaining, and self-creating systems. Through four sections, the book addresses the philosophical concept of autopoiesis and its relations to creativity, destruction, and self-organization; autopoiesis in literature and art history; autopoiesis in religion; and autopoiesis in historiography, cognitive linguistics, and social media. Whether exploring Hegel’s theory of knowledge or the viral spread of conspiracy theories on the internet, the authors concentrate on the ouroboros-like nature of their subjects in the ways they feed off of themselves. devouring one's own tail_mont.indd 1devouring one's own tail_mont.indd 1 11.10.2022 16:4411.10.2022 16:44 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (reg. no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734) implemented at Charles University, Faculty of Arts. The project is carried out under the ERDF Call “Excellent Research” and its output is aimed at employees of research organizations and Ph.D. students. © Edited by Vojtěch Kolman, Tomáš Murár, 2022 © Texts by Jakub Jehlička and Eva Lehečková, Jakub Jirsa, Tomáš Halík, Tomáš Klír, Vojtěch Kolman, Tereza Matějčková, Tomáš Murár, Miroslav Petříček, Martin Procházka, Ondřej Slačálek, Josef Šebek, Josef Šlerka, Josef Vojvodík, Eva Voldřichová Beránková, 2022 © Translation by Peter Gaffney (pp. 98–134), Phil Jones (pp. 36–60, 304–314), Sean M. Miller (pp. 250–279), Gerald Turner (pp. 215–227), 2022 Cover and layout by Jan Šerých Set in the Czech Republic by Karolinum Press First English edition A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of the Czech Republic. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ISBN 978-80-246-5132-3 (pdf) ISBN 978-80-246-5131-6 https://doi.org/ 10.14712/9788024651323 KAROLINUM PRESS is a publishing department of Charles University Ovocný trh 560/5, 116 36 Prague 1, Czech Republic www.karolinum.cz The original manuscript was reviewed by Prof. RNDr. Ladislav Kvasz, DSc., Dr., Doc. Mgr. Ondřej Beran, PhD. NextGenerationEU Funded by the European Union Charles University Karolinum Press www.karolinum.cz [email protected] List of Contents “All That Is Straight Lies”: Introduction (Vojtěch Kolman) 7 Part I: Methods of Self-Creation The Method Is Justified by Its Outcome (Miroslav Petříček) 36 From Boundaries to Interfaces: Autopoietic Systems and the “Ontology of Motion” (Martin Procházka) 61 “I am the Combat”: Hegel’s Dramatic Theory of Knowledge (Vojtěch Kolman) 82 Part 2: Narratives of Self-Creation and Self-Destruction Autopoiesis and “Pure Culture of Death Instinct”: Creativity as a Suicidal Project (Josef Vojvodík) 98 The Dark Side of the End of Art (Tomáš Murár) 135 The Author in the Making: Ethos, Posture, and Self-Creation (Josef Šebek) 152 A Negative Autopoietic Principle in French Interpretations of Hegel – Breton, Sartre, Bataille (Eva Voldřichová Beránková) 173 Part 3: Religion and Education as Autopoietic Projects Luhmann’s Religious Carnival and the Limits of Communication (Tereza Matějčková) 192 Historical Transformations of Christianity and Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Systems (Tomáš Halík) 215 On Universities and Contemporary Society: The Issue of Trust (Jakub Jirsa) 228 Part 4: Society in an Autopoietic Perspective An Autopoieticist Vision of Society: Luhmann’s Social System Theory and the Understanding of Medieval Transformation (Tomáš Klír) 250 Participatory Sense-Making through Bodies: Self-Organizing Principles in the Continuity of Life and Mind (Eva Lehečková and Jakub Jehlička) 280 Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation as Viruses in Social Media (Josef Šlerka) 304 Aspiring Autopoiesis and Its Troubles: What Else Is Produced When the Nation Is Reproduced (Ondřej Slačálek) 315 Abstract 331 7 “All That Is Straight Lies”: Introduction Vojtěch Kolman ‘All that is straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf contemptuously. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is acircle.’ Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1 The Circle or the Ruler? Nietzsche’s wordplay with “all that is straight lies” and “all truth is crooked” may be both part of his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things as well as his program of the revaluation of values– even somewhere in the spirit of Goethe’s Hexenküche with its magic square innuendo “nine is one” and “ten is none” (Goethe 2004, 36). For us, though, the modest, conceptual reading is more relevant, with the central opposition between the straight line and the full circle, or what they traditionally represent: two basic paths our experience can take. The first path proceeds linearly, replacing the old truth with the new one, and so on, ad infinitum. The second path returns after several steps back to its beginning, only to start the same route anew. Both might resemble aliving organism, perhaps the legendary snake uroboros, at first crawling away in adesperate quest to appease an ever-existing hunger and later being at relative rest while devouring its own tail. As such, they are either too mundane or too mysterious, too short or too long for our mind to capture, as Kant (1998, A529/B557) says in his analysis of the antinomies of pure reason. In this volume, the second path is deliberately chosen, with afull awareness of its mysterious and paradoxical nature– as the very title devouring its own tail indicates. The ostensible reason for this is to provide 8 aframe for the representative outputs of the broad interdisciplinary project KREAS, devoted to the autopoietic concept of experience, i.e.experience which is its own product and goal. 1 The very concept of autopoiesis, however, provides an additional and rather traditional reason for taking the “crooked” path rather than the “straight” one: if read linearly, as amere means to some external goal, experience becomes reducible to this goal, and, as such, worthless as soon as it might be replaceable by anything leading to the same result. Wittgenstein phrased it as aptly with respect to the experience of music, his point, though, remaining quite general: It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us are feelings of joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc. etc. and what repels us in this account is that it seems to say that music is an instrument for producing in us sequences of feelings. And from this one might gather that any other means of producing such feelings would do for us instead of music.– To such an account we are tempted to reply “Music conveys to us itself!” (Wittgenstein 1958, 178) The less traditional and more challenging part of the “autopoietic” choice, as captured in the volume’s title, is the focus on the negative side of it, namely that to “convey to us itself” it must “devour itself”, as means to its own sustenance and growth. This is, obviously, the part which arouses not only interest but also some discomfort because something like that does not seem possible in the world governed by the positive sciences of which the thermodynamical laws are only an example. The suggestion given in this volume is to follow the autopoietic worldview back to the concept of creativity that, by definition, brings into the world something which was not there– at least not in the merely positive sense of the word. This is done from alarge variety of viewpoints, including those of philosophy, philology, aesthetics, and the specialized sciences such as linguistics, archeology, or the religious and media studies. What is common to all of them, and as such can be mentioned already here, at the very beginning, is the phenomenon of the shared language, being aparticularly good example of such anegativity at work. 1 For further details, see Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions for the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World at https://kreas.ff.cuni.cz/en/. Accessed 14 August 2021. 9 2 The Metaphor of the Metaphor To make this last point explicit, Iwill simply follow Nietzsche’s (1979) seemingly radical, but not unfounded claim that by naming different things the same– e.g.very different individual animals by the general description of “snake”– one obviously lies, i.e.blurs the natural differences while ignoring the other, more transparent ones, e.g.that between the snake and the earthworm. What the autopoietic– i.e.self-creating– worldview adds to this experience is presenting it in acautiously positive way, roughly along the lines of Hegel’s “elaboration” on Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic idea: by being the medium of generalization, both from the given situation as well as the subjectivity of the given speaker, language lies, but, in this lying, Hegel adds, it is more truthful since without it no experience proper would be even possible.2 This, of course, could be easily laughed off as aphilosophical “mumbo jumbo”, as Carnap or Russell in their project of the logical analysis of language would certainly do (“in saying that language is lying,” they would ask, “are you lying or telling the truth?”). But before we do that too, just let us think, as akind of exercise, of the phenomenon of metaphor that Nietzsche explicitly drives at. In saying, e.g.that my colleague is aweasel, Iam obviously stating something that is not true in the usual sense of the word, and what is more, Iam stating this while presupposing that those who Iam addressing know that it is not true and they also know that Iknow that. Without this presupposition, the statement would not be ametaphor, but rather amistake or asuggestion to extend the concept of aweasel by anew exemplar, i.e.amere stipulation or an analytic sentence. Thus, in using the metaphor, Iam lying for the benefit of abigger truth, to reveal something new not only about the world around us– e.g.my colleague’s insincerity or manipulative nature– but also about the standard use of our words, despite and because it is at variance with them. In the light of this, Carnap’s prospective objection is misplaced, or rather ignorant, failing to notice that Nietzsche’s claim “language is 2 Hegel writes: “We also express the sensuous as auniversal, but what we say is: This, i.e., the universal this, or we say: it is, i.e.,being as such. We thereby of course do not represent to ourselves the universal. This or being as such, but we express the universal; or, in this sensuous-certainty we do not at all say what we mean. However, as we see, language is the more truthful. In language, we immediately refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the truth of sensuous-certainty, and language only expresses this truth, it is, in that way, not possible at all that we could say what we mean about sensuous being” (Hegel 2018, 62). 16 If one takes the situatedness seriously, one can easily replace the Euclidian surface with the curved surface of asphere, such as our Earth’s, and check that the first four postulates are still fulfilled. The second postulate, particularly, holds because the straight line now, boundless as it is, becomes the sphere’s great circle, both finite and infinite at the same time. The paradigmatic change proper, though, occurs with respect to the fifth postulate, according to which– or rather according to its more famous rewording, the so called Playfair axiom5– in aplane, one and only one parallel can be drawn to the given line through the given point. Unlike the previous postulates, the parallel postulate is violated, because any two sphere’s great circles obviously intersect each other. Thus, the phenomenon of non-Euclidian geometry arises. What Iam suggesting now is that Hegel’s solution of Kant’s paradoxes follows the same conceptual pattern, treating both antinomic sides as valid by giving reality aparadoxical form of acircle, or, the circle of circles, as Hegel calls the Absolute, i.e.the fully developed version of the Spirit. The transfer from Euclidian to non-Euclidian geometries illustrates in which sense this “circle” parable can be used; namely, not as asimple label for some radically new solution to the old problems, but as an insight that this solution consists exactly in comparing the old solutions with the new ones, in away corresponding to Dürer’s self-referential pictures. The difference between the “new concepts”, such as straight line or circle, is as important as their continuity, and, in fact, it is their difference that constitutes this continuity in the same way in which Euclidian geometry constitutes the intelligibility of the non-Euclidian systems. If read adequately, they do not just represent anew evolutionary stage in the scientific development, but also “the eternal return” to the original meaning of geometry as an operative part of our spatial orientation in the environment. The “irritations” and “shocks” behind this development are easily identifiable with the focus on both microand macro-cosmoses instead of the traditional environment of medium-sized objects, times, and distances. In this rather complex sense the given circle is not vicious, i.e.explaining the same by the same, but hermeneutical, returning to its beginning, yet this time enriched by the journey undergone which, in asense, is part of the goal and, as such, somehow identical with it. 5 Both axioms are not equivalent as such, but with respect to the whole of Euclidian geometry. See Heath’s commentary in Euclid 1968, 312–14. 17 5 The Friendly Devil So far, my goal has been to indicate in which sense the reference to the “curved truth” metaphor is not only some poetic innuendo, but has some real conceptual ground, the ultimate purpose of which is to establish aframework for the explanation of who we are. So, for Hegel, the dilemma of “straight” vs. “circular” is not just alogical wordplay, but most importantly the symbol of the tragedy of our lives which repeatedly strive for something new, replacing one thing by another, be it the scientific theory or any other goal, without the promise of arriving at some definitive solution and finding the final rest. This Golgotha of Spirit, as Hegel (2018, 467) calls it, is anatural part of our lives, or these lives themselves, and not uncommonly leads to ultimate skepticism or resignation, if not despair. The belief in the transcendent solutions, be it the objective world of the positive sciences or the unreachable beyond of the traditional religions, does not usually help here and even amplifies the resulting despair. This is particularly because it leads us away from atrue solution of acertain kind of cautious, moderate optimism in which one does not want to replace desperation by false promises of other-worldly certainty, but to capture the true meaning of what Hegel calls the Speculative Good Friday,6 or the moment of history in which the death of God stands for the possibility of anew life. It is exactly this moment of transforming the negativity into something relatively positive in which, for Hegel, our experience circumscribes the full circle. The religious metaphor used here, obviously, has some ambivalent, double-faced meaning, standing both for the unhappy, transcendent concepts of life and for the essential steps that the Spirit has to take to its 6 The relevant and extremely enigmatic passage is this: “But the pure concept or infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed, must signify the infinite grief purely as amoment of the supreme Idea, and no more than amoment. Formerly, the infinite grief only existed historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead,’ upon which the religion of more recent times rests; the same feeling that Pascal expressed in so to speak sheerly empirical form: ‘la nature est telle qu’elle marque partout un Dieu perdu et dans l’homme et hors de l’homme.’ By marking this feeling as amoment of the supreme Idea, the pure concept must give philosophical existence to what used to be either the moral precept that we must sacrifice the empirical being, or the concept of formal abstraction. Thereby it must re-establish for philosophy the Idea of absolute freedom and along with it the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its Godforsakenness. Since the more serene, less well grounded, and more individual style of the dogmatic philosophies and of the natural religions must vanish, the highest totality can and must achieve its resurrection solely from this harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything, and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of its shape” (Hegel 1977, 190–1). 18 own socialization. The death of God, thus, does not represent only the end of the traditional religions and “superstitions” connected to them, as in one of Nietzsche’s most famous gnomons, but also the death of the divine individual in favor of the Spirit which is wherever two or three are gathered in God’s name (Matt. 18:20). In this sense, for both Hegel and Luhmann, religion is amode of speech, or system, which brings the very fact of differentiation to its utmost limit. By dividing the world into an immanent and atranscendent part, it advocates the latter while belonging to the former, thus arriving at an explicit version of the above-mentioned paradox. For Hegel, this paradox stems from the basic logic of differentiation connected, as here, with the utmost generality, or, one might say, with the very concept of adifference. If determination is negation– or, in Luhmann’s setting, the system splits into the system and its environment –, then to determine some totality, be it the world, God, or the set of all sets, one must delimit it with respect to something else, which, however, by definition, cannot exist. The modern antinomies, starting with those of Kant and proceeding to those of Cantor and Russell, are based on this elevation of nothing, or the inherent negativity of being, to something. Theo-logically speaking, this is to say that God does not admit differentiation, which either jeopardizes his omnipotence or further indicates his intrinsic contradictoriness. The latter option leads directly to the figure of afriendly devil, the first schismatic not by his own will but by being deputized by God. As Nietzsche put it: “The devil has the broadest perspective for God; therefore, he keeps so far away from God– the devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom” (Nietzsche 1966, 87). Mephisto’s self-definition in Goethe’s Faust programmatically plays with the same idea in asignificant detail: FAUST: But still Iask, who are you? MEPHISTOPHELES: Apart of that force which, always willing evil, always produces good. FAUST: That is ariddle. What does it mean? MEPHISTOPHELES: I am the Spirit of Eternal Negation.7 (Goethe 2004, 36; my italics) 7 Faust: Nun gut, wer bist du denn? Mephistopheles: Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft. Faust: Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint? Mephistopheles: Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! 19 The focus rightly put on the combination of negativity and generality, continues with stressing the relation of the whole to its part, which is elaborated on later: FAUST: You call yourself apart, yet stand before me whole? MEPHISTOPHELES: Ionly speak the sober truth. You mortals, microcosmic fools, may like to think of yourselves as complete, but I’m apart of the Part that first was all, part of the Darkness that gave birth to Light.8 (Goethe 2004, 36) Accordingly, God is not seen merely as one part of the basic difference, as the good opposed to the bad, but he is this whole itself which, by means of the devil, makes all the relevant differences. As the Book of Isaiah says: “Iam the Lord, and there is none else. Iform the light, and create darkness: Imake peace, and create evil: Ithe Lord do all these things” (Isa. 45: 5–6). This inner differentiation of the original good into the good and the bad is, in fact, what all Luhmann’s systems do, but religion does that more radically, treating division of the non-divisible as its proper task. It is due to this metatheoretical form of the given discourse that one cannot read the previous considerations as amere relativization of evil, but rather as an appreciation of the fact that the source of our creativity is the same as that of our destruction. As such, they mutually amplify their potential, of which Faust is aprominent example. Thomas Mann’s variations on this theme in Doktor Faustus are nicely summed up in his lecture “Germany and the Germans”, delivered at the Library of Congress three weeks after the surrender of Nazi Germany on 29 May 1945: The story Itold you in brief outline, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of German “inwardness”. It is amelancholy story,– Icall it that, instead of “tragic”, because misfortune should not boast. This story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys, agood one and abad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin. For that reason it is quite impossible for 8 Faust: Du nennst dich einen Teil, und stehst doch ganz vor mir? Mephistopheles: Bescheidne Wahrheit sprech ich dir. Wenn sich der Mensch, der kleine Narrenwelt, gewöhnlich für ein Ganzes hält: Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war, ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar. 20 one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany and to declare: “Iam the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe; Ileave it to you to exterminate the wicked one.” (Mann 1945, 18) It is exactly this double-faced or fragile nature of humanity that is the topic of the religious discourse, warning us that we are not only passive products of evolution, of the survival of the fittest, as the positive sciences would like to say, excusing us easily from anything we do, or justifying these doings by transferring the guilt to the others, but that we are also essentially creative beings, accommodating ourselves to our environment and accommodating this environment to our ever-changing needs. This creativity, our ability to destroy or deform what there positively is by reading it in some new, “creative” way, is what defines us as cultural beings as opposed to the merely natural ones, such as brutes and animals. As cultural beings, we might call ourselves beyond good and evil, not just by rejecting the conventional morals of our fathers and forefathers, but in amore radical, and, in fact, contradictory way of being co-responsible for what we do, including the consequences that our deeds had, no matter whether these consequences were intentional or not. This codependency of good and evil, of good intentions and evil deeds, is completely neglected and misunderstood in all the positive accounts of humanity in their hedonistic and utilitaristic approach to the world. Just consider Nietzsche’s outcry: What? The aim of science should be to give men as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other [...]? And that is how things may well be. (Nietzsche 1974, 85) Along these lines, to be moral is to not to be amoral in aconventional sense of the word, but to be moral more radically, according to Hegel’s concept of heroic consciousness (Hegel 2018, 385). It is while acting, as Hegel says, that one becomes necessarily guilty, not because we are subjects to some natural law of guilt, but because the guilt is one of the constitutive features of our culture, of our autopoietic ability to make things what they are not, or, more importantly, to become someone else. This guilt is something, for which we must always take responsibility, not only as individual agents, but also as belonging to the society that acts. 21 6 Lying as a Work of Art In discussing the autopoietic worldview, Istarted with an example of language, both (1) as an exercise which, in its metaphorical reading, leads us from one metaphor to another, being in fact itself ametaphor of ametaphor, and (2) as amedium through which negativity enters the world. Now, after what has been said, Ican repeat the same move by maintaining that it is our language, with its ability to both invent and corrupt, or lie in both the positive and negative sense of the word, through which, as Eagleton (2010, 30–1) put it in his essay On Evil, “man is Faustian Man, too voraciously ambitious for his own well-being, perpetually driven beyond his own limits by the lure of the infinite”. This “lure”, or the language’s “death drive”, lies exactly in the metaphor’s ability to abstract from certain finite differences, be it from the different phenomena (all these different creatures will be named “snake”) or from the different cognizing subjects (Icall them “snake” because you call them “snake” too), i.e.in drawing alinguistic meta-difference between things that matter and things that do not. Only in this way does objective knowledge as something universal become possible. The sinister consequences are part of that: Those who try to leap out of their finite situation in order to see more clearly end up seeing nothing at all. Those who aspire to be gods, like Adam and Eve, destroy themselves and end up lower than the beasts, who are not so plagued by sexual guilt that they need afig leaf. Even so, this aberration is an essential part of our nature. It is apermanent possibility for rational animals like ourselves. We cannot think without abstraction, which involves reaching beyond the immediate. When abstract concepts allow us to incinerate whole cities, we know we have reached too far. Aperpetual possibility of going awry is built into our capacity for sense-making. Without this possibility, reason could not function. (Eagleton 2010, 32–3) The identification of the source of all division, as well as of autopoiesis, with language, is not amere accidental observation, but also aretrospection of what we have been doing so far, namely using our language to draw differences, including the difference of the difference. In this retrospection, what might be noticed is that such apossibility of both creating something and destroying it by “reaching too far” expresses itself in aparticularly self-conscious way in the indirect forms of language, 22 such as metaphor, irony, or jokes, in which one problematizes or even undermines our relation to the world and to ourselves. As such, these “crooked” narrative forms are the true tools of the devil, as opposed to the straight forms of Godly or “objective” discourse of positive sciences. In the end, of course, everything is a“matter of difference”. The true domain of the “crooked” forms of our discursive practices is undoubtedly the art, as the most powerful and, at the same time, dangerous realm of the spirit. This is, in fact, how Iread Hegel’s famous delimitation of beauty as the sensuous shining or manifestation of truth, which, in this reading, is not some specific truth, but the truth about truth. The indirect forms of speech, Iwould suggest, are adequate to that goal by capturing– by their broadly semantic form– the universe that is divided not only into us and our environment, but mainly into us that is Iand us that is the others, as any social concept of knowledge requires. My previous short presentation of metaphor as topos requiring the scene in which the addressee knows that I– the speaker– know that what Iam saying is not true in order that it could be true is an example of what Imean by that. Against this background, art is never only an appendix to the more serious and straightforward matters such as science, but both its devilish counterpart and its spiritus agens, not only in capturing the original sense of treating the difference as creating something new, at variance with how things positively are or have been so far, but in its being at the same time aware of experience’s destructive powers. This starts with mere stipulations such as “Ais A” to be read as “this will be called A”, which is trivially true, yet completely vacant, not being aclaim proper but rather apreparation for it. Transformation of “Ais A” into the more informative “Ais B” is what matters here and can easily start with the observation that “Ais A” also presupposes the difference, not only of Aon the left side from the Aon the right side, but also of Aas such against all other possible differences. Thus, any claim is and even must be, in asense, alie, based on the identification of what is different, e.g.different individuals, as what is the same, e.g.by being named “snake”. But it is exactly this lie, and its crooked way of dealing with things, that represents away to the truth, consisting in joining the different ends Aand B as one, thus forming abasic circle of conceptual explanation. As ameans of such unnatural or counter-natural combination of two unrelated concepts Aand B in the judgement of “Ais B”, language might represent the corruption that “society imposes in order to exist”. Accordingly, truths rooted in metaphors are lies, or “illusions which we have 23 forgotten are illusions, […] metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force” (Nietzsche 1979, 84). But this focus on the original force reflects the positive side of the whole story, namely the primordial creative process: The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for asingle instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. The drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that aregular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks anew realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myths and in art generally. (Nietzsche 1979, 88–9) If read in the Freudian manner, in which the channel– or the release of the surplus energy– just leads back to the original happiness of the pre-cultural state, simply by avoiding, though temporarily, the barriers and differences built around us by culture, the art and its treatment of metaphors seem to be only an analgetic to our eternal state of pain. But one can pursue amore radical goal, close to the final redemption of humanity by the reconciliation of experience’s creative and destructive powers. Oscar Wilde phrased this point, in adouble-ironic way, like this: CYRIL: Lying! Ishould have thought that our politicians kept up that habit. VIVIAN: Iassure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is afine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If aman is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of alie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. (Wilde 2010, 5) The true liar, of course, is an artist who sees that at the beginning of any truth there is acreative act of lying which, as “the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art” (Wilde 2010, 37). This does not separate the artist, as amere believer in fiction, from the scientist, as amere believer in hard facts, but, on the contrary, makes them compatible, the artist being even superior to the scientist because he or she makes the underlying metaphorical sources of all our truths explicit. 24 The artistic message to humanity is as follows: to read any “Ais B” as ametaphor is arisky, yet rewarding, enterprise if one captures the metaphor right, i.e.reveals, with respect to the obvious untruth, or “dissimulation”, some deeper layer leading to anew insight or truth. That is why the “good” metaphor, like the “true” cognition, as Scruton (1997, 86) repeatedly points out, is not based on amere similarity, but just the opposite, on overcoming the obvious difference by aconnection that somehow leads to the transformation of reader’s experience. 7 Backdoor to Paradise What this transformation of our experience looks like is the very heart of the whole problem in which all the above-mentioned areas of experience– i.e.science, art, or religion– meet and prospectively adjust each other. They all agree, at least in their autopoietic setting, that there is some defining difference, true vs. false, beautiful vs. ugly, or grace vs. sin, and that we are falling prey to the latter while aspiring to the former. The idea now is to take this differentiation as well as our oscillation between the given poles as astimulating rather than destructive one, defining the whole enterprise of experience as adouble-movement starting with our propensity to fall and reading our successes only as relative improvements on these failures once they did happen. The biblical story of the First Fall captures our situation quite well by connecting the original sin and the loss of naivete with the very emergence of humanity. The next step, though, is acomplicated one, belonging to the true meaning of autopoiesis, namely whether the goal of mankind is to return to the original state of grace in which one is not aware of the ridge between the man and his environment, or whether there is some way of keeping the difference yet being reconciled with it. Or, as Hegel put it, whether one can achieve the state in which “the wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind” (Hegel 2018, 387). Kleist’s enigmatic essay “On the Marionette Theatre” offers the following ingenious solution: Such mistakes, he mused, cutting himself short, are inevitable because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. And Paradise is bolted, with the cherub behind us; we must journey around the world and determine if perhaps at the end somewhere there is an opening to be discovered again. Ilaughed. Indeed, Ithought, the spirit cannot err where it does not exist. (Kleist 1972, 24) 25 The return to the Paradise, as Kleist claims, is possible, yet not identical with the previous unconscious state of God’s marionette. Rather it is the state of somebody who achieved abalance in his life, and, as such, discovered paradise’s new opening. In my reading, this is the lesson to be taken from Kleist’s substory of the young man who by observing himself in the mirror, i.e.by the gift of self-reflection, loses his previous grace to the vice of vanity. Due to self-reflection and the knowledge built on it, so my reading goes, we are deprived of the life in the given moment. We become divided– or, as Nietzsche put it, we are dividua, not individua (Nietzsche 1996, 42)– and, as such, feel discontent with what we currently are. The insight into the impossibility of mirroring the world exactly as it is can even bring us to the verge of despair, in which we proceed from one failure to another without some satisfaction in sight. But then, suddenly, the new possibility arises, stemming from the second insight that the goal of our experience is not to mirror anything as it is, if only for the reason that by such amirroring one will duplicate the world and thus make it, as in the seemingly trivial sentence of “Ais A”, what it is not. What we typically do is something else, namely enlarging the original state of affairs by new possibilities of expression and, accordingly, new varieties of grace. Thus, e.g., by playing amusical instrument, one necessarily starts with the state of discontent, the unpleasant moments of exercising and failing to play it right, in which we have to constantly think about ourselves, about the coordination of our body with the requirements of the score. But if everything goes right, one might arrive at the state in which one does not have to think about what one does, being in the original state of identity with the world, i.e.in the state of grace unknown to the world before. This is how Iread the final words of Kleist from the already discussed essay: We can see the degree to which contemplation becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, so that the grace that is there emerges all the more shining and triumphant. Just as the intersection of two lines from the same side of apoint after passing through the infinite suddenly finds itself again on the other side– or as the image from aconcave mirror, after having gone off into the infinite, suddenly appears before us again– so grace returns after knowledge has gone through the world of the infinite, in that it appears to best advantage in that human bodily structure that has no consciousness at all– or has infinite consciousness– that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God. Therefore, Ireplied, somewhat at 32 “Historical Transformations of Christianity and Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoietic Systems”, draws on Luhmann’s claim that the modern process of secularization is not necessarily at variance with the influence of religious thinking, but they, in fact, strengthen each other if captured in an adequate way. In asystem of short paragraphs, Halík sketches his idea of what this adequate way is with reference to his recently published book, The Afternoon of Christianity. Courage for Transformation, that is devoted to the transformations of Western Christianity and the possibilities of the further development of it in postmodern pluralist culture. In the final paper of this part, Jakub Jirsa reflects on the role of university and the higher education in modern society. In his essay, “On Universities and Contemporary Society: The Issue of Trust”, he argues it is the autopoietic nature of the university– going back to Hegel’s concept of Bildung as work on itself, as opposed to the authoritative and instrumentally conceived methods of education– which, in fact, stands behind the degradation of universities in the modern world governed by the managerial, i.e.instrumental, approach to the world and to others. The fourth and final part, Society in an Autopoietic Perspective, covers several case-studies from avariety of research fields. In his study, “An Autopoieticist Vision of Society: Luhmann’s Social System Theory and the Understanding of Medieval Transformation”, Tomáš Klír provides acomparison of Luhmann’s systems theory with the concept of medieval transformation in abold attempt to extend the scope of Luhmann’s autopoietic methodology to the world of historical sciences. His idea is to use the autopoietic vision of society as an extremely effective tool for description, analysis, and understanding of the dialogical relationship between people and their artefactual world, particularly between the organization and interactions in pre-industrial peasant communities and the geographical patterns of field systems in which these communities operated. After that, Jakub Jehlička’s and Eva Lehečková’s contribution “Participatory Sense-Making through Bodies: Self-Organizing Principles in the Continuity of Life and Mind” brings us to the field of cognitive linguistics and language philosophy. Based on the idea of language as something that both individually and socially embodies abroadly conceived concept of linguistic gesture, Jehlička and Lehečková– based on an analysis of performative gestures employed in Petipa’s productions of Adam’s Giselle– describe how new forms arise from the old, familiar ones and how they can sediment. Josef Šlerka, in his essay “Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation as Viruses in Social Media”, addresses the negative concepts of disinformation, conspiracy, and lies, treating them as 33 kinds of viruses (or according to Richard Dawkins, memes) of the human mind. In his reading, the human mind thus becomes not the centre, but the environment, and the rules of how the viruses spread and mutate come to the fore. The part as well as the whole volume is concluded by Ondřej Slačálek’s paper “Aspiring Autopoiesis and Its Troubles: What Else Is Produced When the Nation Is Reproduced”. Starting with the explicit goal “to understand the nation as aconstruct that reconstructs itself and thus to understand how elements of spontaneity and elements of construction are present”, Slačálek explores what he calls “the myth of self-constitution” of anation. Based on adiscussion of the ideas of Rousseau, von Clausewitz, Benda, and Arendt, he arrives at amoderate conclusion in which such aconstitution is possible but only via the nation’s relation to other nations and the permanent growth caused by its own endeavor. “The nation is aUroboros devouring its tail,” he concludes, “however, this tail is much fatter at some times than it is at others.” References Aristotle. 1996. Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dante Alighieri. 2014. Inferno. Translated by J. G. Nichols. Richmond, VA: Alma Classics. Dante Alighieri. 2017. Paradise. Translated by J. G. Nichols. Richmond, VA: Alma Classics. Eagleton, Terry. 2010. On Evil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Egginton, William. 1999. “On Dante, Hyperspheres, and the Curvature of the Medieval Cosmos”. Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (2): 195–216. Euclid. 1968. The Thirteen Books of the Elements. Volume I. Translated by Sir Thomas L. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galileo Galilei. 2012. Selected Writings. Translated by William R. Shea, and Mark Davie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2004. Faust. Translated by Stuart Atkins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by Walter Cerf, and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, William. 1997. “The Will to Believe“. In Pragmatism. AReader, edited by Louis Menand, 69–92. New York: Vintage Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer, and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleist, Heinrich von. 1972. “On the Marionette Theatre“. Translated by Thomas G. Neumiller. The Drama Review 16: 22–6. Kvasz, Ladislav. 2008. Patterns of Change. Linguistic Innovations in the Development of Classical Mathematics. Birkhäuser: Berlin. Luhmann, Niklas. 2012. Theory of Society. Volume 1. Translated by Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 34 Luhmann, Niklas. 2013. Introduction to Systems Theory. Translated by Peter Gilgen. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Mann, Thomas. 1945. Germany and the Germans. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. 1984. The Tree of Knowledge. Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Translated by Robert Paolucci. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1979. “On Truth and Lies in aNon-Moral Sense”. In Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, edited by Daniel Breazeale, 77–97. Jersey City, NJ: Humanities Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human. ABook for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, Mark A. 1979. “Dante and the 3-sphere”. American Journal of Physics 47 (12): 1031–5. Peterson, Mark A. 2011. Galileo’s Muse. Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rovelli, Carlo. 2020. There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. London: Allen Lane. Rucker, Rudy. 2007. Infinity and the Mind. The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 2010. The Decay of Lying and Other Essays. London: Penguin Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Part I Methods of Self-Creation 36 The Method Is Justified by Its Outcome Miroslav Petříček Section 1 Over the last half century or so, thinking has been characterised by an openness that accentuates the event-based nature of time (i.e.does not exclude the unpredictable), non-hierarchisation and de-centralization. This has been both aperiod of general transformation, and yet asignificant period in its own right, since it also represents the thinking through of change, namely modification, refashioning, i.e.action/event. And this is why even so much as describing this transformation is difficult: it does not have asingle cause, and it is not impossible that the search for causes is itself something that this transformation bequeaths us in the sense that it problematises the classical notion of causality. It would thus perhaps be more accurate to say that this transformation arises from acertain constellation of aporias culminating in ageneral problematisation of the current way of thinking, in the light of which certain theoretical problems appear as paradoxes, as something that is irresolvable in respect of the dominant “image of thought” (Deleuze’s term), since the only solution would be to change the framework. One of the striking features of this transformation (and not merely modification) is how it undermines aconcept of order hitherto accepted without question, comprising unquestioned operative concepts such as system and, until the 1960s, structure, the common denominator of which was an endeavour to abstract from historicity. However, during the 1960s we also see the assertion of anew element, namely, the concept of autopoietic systems or self-organisation. This changes everything. We are 37 now speaking of aprocessual order, and what we mean by system is now aprocess in which the dynamic relationship between the various components or instances of said system allows them to self-organise without any external or internal cause (as classical thinking would have it) in the form of responses to changes in their environment; the system moves to alevel of higher complexity, in which new properties are created or appear (both are implied in the word emergence in the sense of spontaneous generation) that cannot be explained as being the product of some force external to the system in question. The 1970s and 1980s then saw anumber of books published that now enjoy the status of classics, which interpret (within abroader context) this process of self-organisation. Ilya Prigogine, Henri Atlan, Stuart Kauffmann and Michel Serres (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Atlan 1999; Atlan 2003; Kauffmann 1983; Serres 1969–1980) are but afew of the authors to deal with this question. Akey to understanding the internal dynamic of autopoietic systems is by examining how they interact with their environment. The system reacts to what is happening in its environment (which can often not be predicted by the system and thus has the character of an event in the strict sense of the word: it is historical) by means of its internal transformation in such away that it is able to decode these errors (noise) as information. Hence the principle order from noise (which is considerably at odds with the traditional notion of the formation of order): hence, too, another of the possible definitions of an open, processual order. Henri Atlan summarises this concept briefly and precisely in his essay “Noise as aPrinciple of Self-Organization” of 1972, which it suffices to quote: it does not seem correct to characterize them entirely as errors. The noise provoked in the system by random factors in the environment will no longer be truly noise from the moment it is used by the system as afactor of organization. This is to say that factors in the environment are not random. But, of course, they are. Or more exactly, it depends on the subsequent reaction of the system in relation to which, aposteriori, these factors are recognized as either random or as part of the organizing process. Apriori, they are in effect random, if one defines randomness as the intersection of two independent chains of causality: the causes of their occurrence have nothing to do with the chain of phenomena that has constituted the prior history of the system until then. It is thus that their occurrence and their encounter with the system can constitute noise from the viewpoint of the exchanges of information in the system, where these 38 encounters are susceptible to producing only errors. But from the moment the system is capable of responding to these “errors”, not just so that it does not disappear, but rather so that the system uses them to modify itself in away that benefits it or at least ensures its subsequent survival– in other words, from the moment the system is capable of integrating these errors into its own organization– then these errors lose, aposteriori, alittle of their character of error. They retain this only from aviewpoint exterior to the system, in that the effects of the environment on the system do not themselves correspond to any preestablished program contained in the environment and destined to organize or disorganize the system. On the contrary, from the interior perspective, insofar as organization consists precisely in aseries of recaptured disorganizations, they do not appear as errors except at the instant of their occurrence. The thermodynamic mechanisms of order through fluctuation seem to put the accent on the internal character of organizational noise. This distinction is not areal one, and in relation to amaintenance of the status quo (which would be as unfortunate as it is imaginary) of the organized system, which one pictures to oneself as soon astatic description of it can be given. Indeed, after this instant, the errors are integrated, recuperated as factors of organization. The effects of noise then become events in the history of the system and its process of organization. They remain, however, effects of noise inasmuch as their occurrence was unforeseeable. It thus might be sufficient to consider organization as an uninterrupted process of disorganization and reorganization, and not as astate, for order and disorder, the organized and the contingent, construction and destruction, life and death, to no longer be really distinct. However, this is not at all the case. The processes in which this unity of oppositions realizes itself (this realization not being anew state, asynthesis of thesis and antithesis, but amovement of the process itself– the “synthesis” being nothing besides this) cannot exist except inasmuch as errors are apriori true errors, inasmuch as order at agiven moment is truly perturbed by disorder, inasmuch as destruction, while not total, is real, inasmuch as the irruption of the event is areal irruption (acatastrophe, amiracle, or both at once). In other words, the processes that appear to us as one of the foundations of the organization of living beings, as results of asort of collaboration between what we are accustomed to calling life and death, cannot exist except to the degree that they are never really about collaboration but always about radical opposition and negation. (Atlan [1972] 2011, 111–12) 39 Here’s alittle thought experiment: read the lengthy quote above as if it were describing the relationship of philosophy to (historical) reality, and bear this in mind when looking back over the changes that have taken place in thinking over the last half century or so. This is not merely amechanical task, but involves arigorous search for other concepts and models. In this thought experiment the system (in asense autopoietic) will be philosophy, or rather philosophical discourse, the environment of which is unfolding reality and the unexpected perturbations occurring in it (problems that must be resolved even though we have no proven way of dealing with them, as Adorno would say), to which thinking reacts by means of its own transformation, after which it is able to incorporate these perturbations or irritations (events) in itself (to grant them significance, to turn them into information). However, all of this must now be illustrated in the work of specific writers, and the inspiration behind their work revealed. At the same time, the broader context must be borne in mind (the relationship of philosophical discourse to tradition) and similar considerations undertaken on the basis of acomparison of the system we call philosophy and the system we call artistic creation. Section 2 However, things are made somewhat more complex by the fact that not even the term environment is as clear cut in this context as it might appear at first sight. At this point it might be useful to introduce another term, namely model, above all in the sense that it is used by the semiotician Yuri Lotman. This will also help us answer the question of why the experience of and reflection upon artistic creation participates to such asignificant extent in the transformation of the notion of order, and why so many philosophers have addressed the topic of aesthetics from the mid-20th century onwards, from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, via the existentialists and structuralists, to Lyotard, Derrida, Nancy, Marion, et al. Moreover, the concern displayed by philosophers not to restrict the subject of their enquiries to books often takes ahitherto unusual form. They now participate fully in the planning of exhibitions, they write introductions to catalogues, they devote more of the energies to the topic of aesthetics (albeit taking issue with philosophical aesthetics of the past), and the creative process becomes part of philosophical argumentation. Why is this? It is because the meaning of art seems to reside in the fact that the 40 artwork somehow interprets reality, while at the same time anticipating it. In other words, the artwork models reality. Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, who takes art to be a“secondary modelling system” (Lotman 1981), adopts adescription of the model from cybernetics and information theory. This is completely logical, since his semiotics develops in association with atheory of text within the framework of culture, while at the same time conducting apolemic with an understanding of text as merely the carrier of non-textual structures or pre-textual (pre-semiotic) meanings. Lotman criticises classical and certain modern theories of the text for merely bumping up against the text that is supposedly the object of their investigation, since they always end up behind it, in front of it or outside it. In contrast, Lotman asserts that the text does not embody meaning, nor does it manifest it: the text produces meaning, it is the active generator of meaning. According to Lotman, the texts of agiven culture fall into one of two categories. The first contains texts whose function is to impart information in the most appropriate way. The ideal text in this category would be one written in an artificial language guaranteeing maximum concordance between addresser and addressee. The second category contains texts traditionally referred to as artistic. Such atext generates meaning, above all because it is agame of different languages, which also happens to be the most general description of the creative process. We find asomewhat sophisticated analogy to these two limits to the communication and generation of meaning in Barthes’ distinction between readerly texts and writerly texts (lisible, i.e.areadable text; scriptible, i.e.atext that can only be read by virtue of each reader themselves rewriting it, in other words, writing it) (Barthes 2002, 119–341; Barthes 2007). The general semiotic definition is less poetic, though precise: “The text appears as aunity composed of at least two subtexts, which have afundamentally different organization, and of some meta-level mechanism that connects the two subtexts and guarantees their mutual translatability” (Barthes 2007, 15). However, this meta-level is not agiven, but is aplace where secondary codes are forever being constructed, by which the equivalence is made possible of initially completely diverse languages or differently coded texts. In other words, texts arise from languages (and because of that we have, for instance, aconstant supply of new novels), but likewise languages arise from texts. 41 The processes of sense-making emerge both as aresult of the interaction of semiotically heterogeneous layers of the text, which are in arelationship of mutual untranslatability, and as aconsequence of complex sense-creating conflicts between the text and the heterogeneous context. (Lotman 1981, 15) Confirming or verifying these theses would involve adetailed investigation of what happens when, for instance, acertain culture takes receipt of aforeign (in the sense of incomprehensible) text that, precisely because of its incomprehensibility, sets in motion all the semiotic mechanisms of said culture, in which the whole point is to create some secondary code or language on the basis of which it would be possible to accept this foreign text (i.e.to concede that it speaks intelligibly, to grant it credibility, etc.). Based on this concept we can now link the mechanism of semiosis with energetics, providing we adopt athermodynamic definition that says that energy is the general equivalent of transformation, because we are now in aposition to say that the indecipherability of aheterogeneous text or context represents the energy that sets in motion the process of creating meaning (Sinnbildung rather than Sinngebung), i.e.the transformation of noise into amessage. However, the reference to heterogeneity as an energy source of the dynamic process of Sinnbildung (sense formation) means that it is impossible to consider the text (and any semiotic system in general) in isolation, outside its relationship to the environment (which from the point of view of text is always to some extent or other non-text). Lotman’s language, ahighly original import of cybernetics, systems theory and the theory of self-organisation autopoiesis, thus thermodynamics, would frame things thus: while adescription that eliminates from its object all extrasystematic elements is fully justified when constructing static models, and needs only certain correction coefficients, it presents difficulties of principle for the construction of dynamic models. One of the chief sources of the dynamism of semiotic structures is the constant process of drawing extrasystematic elements into the realm of the system and of expelling systematic elements into the area of non-system. Arefusal to describe the extrasystematic, placing it beyond the confines of science, cuts off the reserve of dynamism and presents us with asystem in which any play between evolution and homeostasis is, in principle, excluded. (Lotman 1981, 93) 48 in amore precise way and following up on Walter Benjamin, he pays increased attention to his own method of presentation (Darstellung). In “The Essay as Form” he makes it clear that content is not indifferent to its own presentation even in philosophy, and that the form of the essay is something that ensues directly from the critique of the (closed, history-eliminating) system, since it incorporates the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure. However, this is exactly where its principal openness is to be found: The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, not in atreasure-hunting obsession with foundations. Its concepts receive their light from aterminus ad quem hidden from the essay itself, not from any obvious terminus aquo, and in this the method itself expresses its utopian intention. All its concepts are to be presented in such away that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the others. In the essay discrete elements set off against one another come together to form areadable context; the essay erects no scaffolding and no structure. But the elements crystallize as aconfiguration through their motion. The constellation is aforce field, just as every intellectual structure is necessarily transformed into aforce field under the essay’s gaze. (Adorno 2019, 13) If we look upon Adorno’s negative dialectics from the perspective of the thinking that has appeared from the mid-20th century onwards, we are justified in stating that its “non-identical” is now becoming either an irreducible remainder (for example in the form of Derrida’s restance non présente) or– which is the same thing– that which transcends absolutely the boundary of the identifiable and representable (beginning with Levinas’s “face” and the asymmetric relationship with the Other, via Nancy’s excessiveness as an infinite ex-positio, to Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis and Derrida’s à-venir). Everywhere we look there is an openness and an accent not on being, but on events, i.e.on processualism (see, for example, the Dílo jako dění smyslu [The Work as aProcess of Meaning] by Milan Jankovič), which has as its necessary complement the relationship of thinking to the event, to its emergence and unpredictable arrival, and therefore also to history. Inasmuch as aproblem particular to philosophy relates to the remainder or that which transcends thinking (i.e.as something unthought), then philosophical discourse itself– its discursive strategies and its relationship to that which comprises the environment of every discursive practice– will find itself foregrounded. 49 One might formulate this more generally thus: that which is external in relation to the existing image of thought and its dominant concept of order must somehow be incorporated into this image, though in such away that its radical exteriority does not disappear during this operation. Here there is aparadox: in the coexistence of that which is identical to itself, with that which is incompatible or incommensurable with this identity, it is necessary to reveal an order that, from the perspective of the hitherto dominant philosophical discourse, simply cannot be an order. And since the solution to this paradox is to change the framework, we need to look for other models. Or perhaps looking differently at old models would suffice as afirst step, e.g.catching aglimpse of écriture or adynamic system from the genus of dissipative systems within text and discourse. This is aphilosophical approach inspired by literature, an approach made necessary by the realisation that the content of thinking cannot be separated from the method of its presentation. The inspiration of literature is the inspiration of its speech, which, as Maurice Blanchot points out, gives rise to the world and at the same time leads us to realise that its reality is inaccessible through language, since language is the language of common nouns. Hence the well-known paradox, albeit expressed differently and in another medium: this Other in respect of language (singularity, or being itself in its concreteness) cannot be expressed by (ordinary) language, and yet at the same time language (somehow) relies on this Other, regarding which it wishes constantly to speak, as in aprecursory presence that Imust exclude in order to speak– in order to speak of said presence. Literature resolves this paradox by describing its own ability to name. It records in language the distance that separates us as speakers from the reality of the world, and as such literature becomes aspecial place for showing that which is not shown. This place is exactly what the word écriture refers to. Of the innumerable examples of this, it suffices to quote from the well-known essay by Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author” of 1968: In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of astocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out asystematic exemption of meaning. (Barthes 1977, 147) 50 Jean-Luc Nancy calls this simultaneous extrusion and intrusion exscription. Areferencing via itself to ameaning that can never become agiven. However, the concept of écriture evolved into this form. Its genesis is in linguistics, literary theory and philosophy (Mikhail Bakhtin, Julie Kristeva, Roland Barthes), as is evident from the fact that it gradually incorporated within itself the concept of intertext or intertextuality. This is not an object, but afield of events that is activated both within the text and between texts, afield of incalculable referentiality; it is aprocess that is non-instantiable as such, because it is akin to virtuality, which is always actualised differently and in aunique way with each reading and by each reader differently, without any actualisation being able to exhaust it. It is, to use 1960s parlance, agame, and it is this that allows us to claim that it is an open order, since at least intuitively we feel that not everything can refer to each and all, without mediating articles and long detours through other forms of mediation. This order is already open because it implies an irreducible non-calculability and randomness, though in some sense also anecessity. This is why, for example, Barthes characterised the “text” not as “work”, but as afield of productivity or creation, as atheatre of creation, in which the creator encounters the reader. And so the words significance, signifier and signified (the latter two as components of the sign) are now joined by the word signifiance (the event of sense/ meaning, often with an echo of “jouissance”, ecstasy, as Roland Barthes use the term in his book The Pleasure of the Text, and by which he wishes to intimate the pleasure in multiplicity and simultaneously non-discovery, agame of disclosure and concealment). But once the text is conceived as Production (and no longer as product), “signification” is no longer an adequate concept. As soon as the text is conceived as apolysemic space where the paths of several possible meanings intersect, it is necessary to cast off the monological, legal status of signification, and to pluralise it. (Barthes 1981, 37) Thinking in general and philosophy in particular cannot stand outside this game. Philosophical discourse is not able to reduce this dimension of “signifiance”, even if the phrase “conceptual thinking” would like to suggest otherwise. The substance of concepts is not only the materiality of atext, but also the text qua intertext or (here almost synonymous) écriture; the event of articulation, differentiation, agame in which each actualisation is exposed to virtuality and thus radical otherness in respect of concept, discourse and meaning. As regards the concept and 51 discursiveness, this Other is that which compels thinking, thinking is areaction to this otherness. Thinking is atransformation of discourse in aresponse to otherness such that discourse is able to make the Other communicable and conceivable, albeit at the cost of areduction of its sense to meaning, which is why there is always aremainder, and we always come across something that makes us think again, perhaps think the same thing. Inasmuch as it is impossible for philosophy to dream of closing in on itself and somehow extricating itself from this game, there is no alternative but for philosophical texts also to possess the character of performative texts, which endeavour to do something with the reader, to lead them to something, to force them to answer for themselves and, in their own way, to force them to think and somehow engage with the philosophical text (discourse) in this way. However, this also means that concepts such as intertextuality and écriture are aparallel to the concept of the dynamic or dissipative system, autopoiesis. Section 5 From various writers who have investigated autopoietic, dynamic or dissipative systems in different spheres of science and culture (Francesco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Serres, Katherine Hayles, William Paulson, et al.), we know– to simplify matters somewhat– that the environment or surroundings of asystem, which we tend to understand as its exterior, is always the exterior of this system. If we assume, therefore, that each self-organising system is characterised by operational closure, i.e.that its relationship to its surroundings or environment is not direct, then what the system understands as exterior is something like amodel of this exterior inside the system in question. According to systems theory, systems exist by way of operational closure and this means that they each construct themselves and their own realities. How asystem is real depends on its own self-production. By constructing itself as asystem, asystem also constructs its understanding of the environment. And thus asystematic world cannot suppose any singular, common environment for all systems that can somehow be “represented” within any system. Every system exists by differentiation and thus is 52 different from other systems and has adifferent environment. Reality becomes amultitude of system-environment constructions that are in each case unique. (Moeller 2006, 16) The relationships are far more complex (it is by no means mere coincidence that this involves systems with ahigher level of complexity). Nevertheless, this preliminary image suffices to begin with. In any case, the openness of systems is always the product or effect of their internal activity (their differentiation, which establishes them by setting their boundaries)– they always understand their exterior in their own way. Adifferent perspective, e.g.that of the view of acosmic observer (as it was called by Maurice Merleau-Ponty), is unavailable to them. Thus we are always speaking of asomehow reduced exterior, and yet dealing with this exterior leads to ahigher complexity of the system through the work of its self-organisation. In this reflection upon the complexity and relationship of adynamic system to its surroundings/environment, let us now take another step, without making any claims to terminological accuracy, in the direction of the possible transposition of the elementary differentiations of systems theory into contemporary philosophy. The environment or surroundings of thought would (generally speaking) represent aproblematicity that cannot be reduced by any model that would necessarily simplify their complexity and contingency. However, reduction brings with it the fact that thinking is more often than not irritated, i.e.something resonates in it from its surroundings that it is unable to interpret as information. However, thinking’s possible reaction will not be acausal effect (since we already know that the basic characteristic of every system is its operational closure); the fact that it is irritated shows that, in the given situation, it is unable to react appropriately and must transform itself, all the while retaining its identity qua system (even, for instance, at the cost of declaring itself to be non-philosophy, as in the case of François Laruelle). Thinking will work on such models that are able, within certain limits, to predict the unpredictable (events, origins, emergence), and its evolution to ahigher level of complexity will be an evolution to models of an open order. If we call the irritation of philosophical discourse aproblem, this means that only achange in discourse can be an appropriate and commensurate reaction to it. And if so, as is basically in line with the general tendencies of 20th-century philosophy to thinking of the event and the order that relies on the event, then we can say that what thinking during this period was irritated by above all as aproblem was the 53 phenomenon of event and origin and understanding processual identity or the order of events inside and out, i.e.the problem of history as the surroundings or environment of philosophical thinking. Therefore, if we speak, for example, of the unpredictability of history, then this is acharacteristic inherent in how history is understood by acertain philosophical system, and not acharacteristic of history in and of itself. However, it follows that, inasmuch as the event or emergence (becoming, devenir, Werden) or contingency is at present becoming aprivileged theme of philosophical thinking, and inasmuch as there is atrend towards astudy of the genesis of structures (as in the case of the phenomenology of late Husserl), and inasmuch as philosophy is devoting its attention to the phenomenon of the event in its irreducibility to existing horizons of expectation– this could mean that philosophy has understood to what extent its current conception of history was the correlate of an ideal of philosophy as aclosed system, which was also the determining framework of its relationship to empirical history. The transformation that is at the same time achange to (not amodification of) this framework then begins with areassessment of the relationship between narrative and history, the most striking manifestation of which is the three-volume work by Paul Ricœur Time and Narrative. Ricœur understands narrative as amedium in which an empirical event not only acquires its meaning as ahistorical event, but acquires meaning full stop, this from the moment it is placed within the context of anarratively reconfigured time. This operation then reveals an important feature of the event, which has been studied in detail by Claude Romano in particular, namely, that the event that is occurring still awaits an awareness of its own meaning (it never coincides with the meaning we ascribe to it). As Burkhard Liebsch says: the event seems to be holding out for the time that it will be able to enter into acontext that makes it significant in some way. However, in itself it is ambiguous or significatively polymorphous. Narrativity guarantees its significance by indicating how that which took place followed on from that which had both taken place previously and anticipated that which was yet to take place. It thus gives rise to acertain, specifically narrative order, which emerges from the pre-narrative multiplicity of events and their irreducible disorder. However, this order comes at aprice: Any “synthesis of the heterogeneous” pays for the transformation of wild contingency into ordered contingency by an unsmoothable contingency of itself, which again leads to atrace of other possibilities that would make the events narratively intelligible in adifferent, again heterogeneous, way. 54 It is therefore fallacious to judge that only the narrative order establishes the event as an event. While events can be embedded in different narrative orders, at the same time, their signifying polymorphism resists being cancelled (Aufhebbarkeit) in any narrative order. And it is in this resistance that the “narrative event-ness” of the event is revealed. The event is far from merely contributing in some traceable way to the progress of astory (Geschichte), because in the light of the contingency of narrative it shows itself precisely as that which can never be extinguished (aufgehen) in any narrative intelligibility. Not only can it not be reduced to some sufficient reason and causal determination without exhaustion; not only does it not enter into any succession without exhaustion, but as narrative it also defies reduction to something else to anarrative order that arises through the “synthesis of the heterogeneous”. The heterogeneity of the event as an event lies, from the perspective of narrative, precisely in the fact that it cannot be wholly embodied in any “synthetic” order. (Liebsch 2004, 194–5) Section 6 However, such asynthesis of the heterogeneous is also that which is referred to as tradition, atheme dealt with in Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte. On the one hand, tradition qua sedimented memory is agrid allowing us to read that which we encounter (the historically generated or generating horizon of understanding). On the other hand, it is agrid that is flexible within certain limits, inasmuch as understanding is not amere reproduction of tradition but is also productive (apoint made by Gadamer’s model of dialogue as game). The word effect then refers to the fact that we are always already somehow situated in tradition and that what we experience as new is always mediated by tradition, i.e.integrated within certain limits into the existing horizon of understanding. However, it might be said that Gadamer’s hermeneutics approaches the determination of the meaning of an event analogically to narrative: likewise, tradition is amedium incorporating the new into what has already occurred. However, it is precisely the relationship to tradition that can become an important key to changing the framework, as long as we understand the idea of connecting with or taking on tradition or, as Derrida would put it, accepting our heritage. Derrida says that “we must do everything we can to appropriate apast that we know at its core remains unassignable” (Derrida and Roudinesco 2003, 11), but also 55 that it is aheritage that we must embrace, atradition which, whether we like it or not, we must somehow connect with, because the concept of obligation makes no sense outside the experience of heritage (Derrida and Roudinesco 2003, 13). The logic of this reasoning is not clear at first glance: one of the reasons is probably that, in Derrida’s understanding of tradition as heritage, we hear an echo of one of Benjamin’s theses “On the Concept of History”: “The past carries with it asecret index by which it is referred to redemption” (Benjamin 2006, 390), by which he means that everything individual can only be brought to justice at the end of history, only when alife will not be judged from the perspective of its function in historical events. Benjamin continues: “There is asecret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth” (Benjamin 2006, 390), expected by virtue of the disappearance of its uniqueness in historicity. It is up to us to ensure that this lost uniqueness does not fall into oblivion (for instance, by virtue of history always being written by the victors and not the losers), or– to put things more soberly– that which could not be recognised in the past can be recognised in the light of the present. For Derrida this means an inheritance is never agiven, because it is always atask. That we are heirs does not mean, that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us some day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or not, know it or not. (Derrida 1994, 54) This profound transformation in relation to tradition has no less profound consequences. It combines lines that are somehow close and that intersect in this transformation as soon as it turns out that the concepts of tradition, historical experience and history are almost synonymous, thus illuminating the event as the basic characteristic of historical time and historical memory. For if inheritance is atask and not agiven, then its acceptance is the acceptance of the responsibility for its traditionalisation in the name of the future. And it is acall for responsibility because, as Derrida also says, every acceptance of the past is necessarily its re-affirmation. What does it mean to reaffirm? It means not simply accepting this heritage but relaunching it otherwise and keeping it alive. Not choosing it (since what characterizes inheritance is first of all that one does not choose it; it is what violently elects us), but choosing to keep it alive. 56 Life– being-alive– is perhaps defined at bottom by this tension internal to aheritage, by this reinterpretation of what is given in the gift, and even what is given in filiation. This reaffirmation, which both continues and interrupts, resembles (at least) an election, aselection, adecision. […] It would be necessary to think life on the basis of heritage, and not the other way around. It would be necessary therefore to begin from this formal and apparent contradiction between the passivity of reception and the decision to say “yes”, then to select, to filter, to interpret, and therefore to transform; not to leave intact or unharmed, not to leave safe the very thing one claims to respect before all else…1 (Derrida and Roudinesco 2003, 13) There exists no guide on how to take receipt of the past, just as there is no guide on how to live. Neither history nor life is teleological, no matter how much they attempt to obscure the narrative order and push to one side the suspicion that building on tradition and the past is always about an original response to history. Walter Benjamin had already observed that this was the basic imperative of human life as historical, in which the relationship to the past opens up arelationship to the future, when in his theses he strongly recalled the debt of the present to the past. Paul Ricœur subsequently returned to this idea, writing in the third volume of Time and Narrative: As soon as the idea of adebt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning. […] The scientific use of data stored in and manipulated by acomputer certainly gives birth to anew kind of scholarly activity. But this activity constitutes only along methodological detour destined to lead to an enlargement of our collective memory in its encounter with the monopoly exercised over speech by the powerful and the clerisy. For history has always been acritique of social narratives and, in this sense, arectification of our common memory. (Ricœur 1988, 118–19) 1 Cited in Naas 2008, 31. 57 Section 7 The transformation of philosophical discourse is not aone-way operation; irritation also mobilises its past, in which it is possible right now to update what could not be updated at the time or was pushed aside as being of secondary importance. But all of this is shown in acompletely different light in adifferent present, including, for instance, Benjamin’s understanding of history. The accent on responding without predetermined rules of connection can then be understood as amoment of self-reflection or self-reference on the part of philosophical discourse, which, in various texts by very different authors, states that its condicio sine qua non is its openness, that the order it needs is possibly something for which it can seek inspiration not only in science, but also in art. Acloser look appears in literary texts regarding which we cannot decide conclusively whether they belong to the prose narrative of afictional story, to scientific considerations, or to philosophical reflections on the theme of order, which from the point of view of existing models is non-order. But non-order is not something that cannot somehow be described (description always already anticipates some kind of arrangement), and the same is true of the synonym of non-order, namely chaos, since it is quite useful to imagine chaos as amaximum of information, amaximum of informativeness. Or like what happens when acomplex system collapses, which is afrequent theme of various anti-utopias. However, it is possible to imagine it in other ways, as, for example, Stanislav Lem did in his book His Master’s Voice (whose fictional author is aphilosophical mathematician). In what was supposed to be pure noise, i.e.complete chaos, scientists identified amessage seemingly sent from extraterrestrials (aneutrino letter from the stars). The message is undoubtedly structured, as various attempts to decipher it show, but is structured in such away that we cannot deem structure. What is order in the message is non-order for us. Or in other words: we come across alevel of complexity that we are incapable of infiltrating or fathoming if we start from that level of complexity that we are still able to understand. Aslightly ironic commentary is provided by Roland Barthes, who, in addition to texts intended for reading and texts requiring transcription by the reader, proposes another category, namely illegible texts: Inow conceive (certain texts that have been sent to me suggest as much) that there may be athird textual entity: alongside the readerly and the writerly, there would be something like the receivable. The receivable 64 4 “Flux” and Complexity of Motion in Anti-Oedipus Ontologically, “an endless flux” is an ideal quality of the Greek hyle, designating “the pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possesses”, which extends “to the very limits of the universe” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 36). However, the “ideal” nature of this continuity results from its “relative” (or rather relational?) character: flows of energy are “broken” by organ-machines, which produce flows in relation to an infinite network of other machines. Their relations produce “acontinuous, infinite flux” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 36)– adynamic open structure. In epistemological terms, “flux” refers to “the perspective” from which an “organ-machine” interprets “entire world”, namely “from the point of view of the energy that flows from it” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983,6). While in Nail’s theory “flux” vaguely describes the “kinetic” nature of “the present”, in Anti-Oedipus it is associated with the flows of energy produced and broken by individual organ machines. In existential terms, “flux” characterizes the Nietzsche’s “men of desire” who “ceased being afraid of becoming mad” and whose desire, affirming life in its fundamentally tragic nature (Nietzsche [1901] 1968, 852), is “aflux that overcomes barriers and codes” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 131). This leads to the semiotic meaning of the term: the flux is opposed to “the code” as ashorthand for “the graphic system”, and to the code’s lack of expressivity. Following Leroi-Gourhan ([1965] 1993), Deleuze and Guattari characterize the voice, which has subordinated the graphic system, as asource of “adeterritorialized abstract flux that it retains and makes reverberate in the linear code of writing” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 202). However, the “deterritorialization” of graphic systems produces “asign of asign, the despotic sign […] [t]he sign made letter” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 206). “The signifier implies alanguage that overcodes another language, while the other language is completely coded into phonetic elements” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 208). This process generates “adespotic signifier”, a“repressing representation” which encodes language “into phonetic elements” or “alphabetic script” and reduces the flux into a“linear […] graphic flux”, transforming the unconscious and appropriating “reality in the operation of despotic overcoding” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 208–10). The convergence of “code” and “flux” is accomplished under capitalism, which “decodes” all kinds of social and economic flows– “of property […], money […], 65 production […], workers” and brings them to “conjunction” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 223–4), transforming “the surplus value of code into asurplus value of flux” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 228) and subsuming knowledge, specialized education and culture under asingle heading of capital (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 234). Although “the great mutant flow of capital is pure deterritorialization, […] it performs an equivalent reterritorialization when converted into areflux” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 372). The reflux has numerous forms of economic operations such as regulation of capital markets and interest rates, distribution of employee incomes, influencing consumers’ purchase power, military and security expenses of the state, its bureaucratic apparatuses, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 229, 235). In this way the capitalist deterritorialization is being constantly reterritorialized and the flux always coincides with the reflux and “afflux […] of raw profit” of corporations (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 238). Simultaneously, “as capitalist deterritorialization is developing from the centre to the periphery, […], [e]ach passage of aflux is adeterritorialization, and each displaced limit, adecoding” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 232). Nonetheless, the process of “deterritorialization” is not limited to production and representation within aspecific socioeconomic order (“decoding and deterritorialization of flows”; Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 244). It never exhausts itself by the oscillation between “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 260). There is also adifferent deterritorialization, which “must produce anew earth” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 299). It connects flux with the ontological (and existential) term “line of flight” which rearranges and transforms “multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 9–10),2 as well as “an unconscious libidinal investment of desire”, which “does not bear upon the regime of the social syntheses, but upon the degree of development of the forces or the energies on which these syntheses depend” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 345). 2 The term is anticipated in Anti-Oedipus as “achain of escape”: “The function of the chain is no longer that of coding the flows on afull body of the earth, the despot, or capital, but on the contrary that of decoding them on the full body without organs. It is achain of escape, and no longer acode. The signifying chain has become achain of decoding and deterritorialization, which must be apprehended– and can only be apprehended– as the reverse of the codes and the territorialities” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 328). 66 It can be concluded that in Deleuze and Guattari the notion of “flux” is always connected with the interaction of human bodies and the forms of power, production and communication. Flux can be called “material” only in its simplest and most general ontological form, as the “pure continuity that any sort of matter ideally possesses” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, 36). However, it always exists in its specific social forms related to semiotic aspects of communication (“codes” as well as “decoding”). Which implies that different forms of flux indicate the complexity of the representation of dynamic social processes: their oscillation between “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization”, unconscious desire and regimes of “social syntheses”. In contrast to Nicolis’s and Prigogine’s attempt to model asociety as adynamic system (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 238–42), Deleuze and Guattari consider the interaction of more diverse and complex “actors” than environmental constraints, economic activities, social stratification, etc. (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 240–1). Their understanding of complexity implies, in Nicolis’ and Prigogine’s words, agreater degree of “randomness […] switching on different evolutions, different histories” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 241). 5 “Flux” vs. “Fluxes”: Nail’s “Historical Materialist Ontology” against Complexity Nail misunderstands Deleuze when he tries to reduce the complexity of his term “becoming” (Deleuze [1969] 1990, 1–3) to abinary opposition of “continual flux, matter, and motion” and “difference, thought, and stasis” (Nail 2018, 45). This is an important cause of the vagueness of his uses of “flux” and “ontology of motion”: “There can be all kinds of fluxes: fluxes of time, fluxes of space, fluxes of force, and so on. The ontology of motion is strictly the flux of matter” (Nail 2018, 44). The problem here is not that “[t]ime, space, and force do not transcend matter in motion” (Nail 2018, 44) but that the complexity of motion does not directly depend on its material nature but rather on flows of information, products and capital, as well as on their “codes” and “decoding”. Although Nail refers to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s use ([1972] 1983, 202) of Leroi-Gourhan ([1965] 1993, 113), he does not seem to realize the importance of representation and communication for understanding the complexity of motion. According to Nicolis and Prigogine, the process of decoding can be interpreted in general terms as “selection […] that 67 allows the transfer of complexity from one level to another” (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 143). Even in physical terms Nail does not reflect on the complexity of motion which can be expressed in terms of “fluxes” as “the rates of irreversible processes […] such as heat transfer or diffusion of matter” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 135). Evidently, complexity is characterized by different “fluxes”, but Nail can accept this only in terms of the absolute primacy of material motion: “If there is truly an ontological equality of fluxes, then history and matter are fully capable of becoming other than themselves through their own flux: motion” (Nail 2018, 49). This eliminates the difference of “fluxes” as specific “rates of irreversible processes”. In order to establish the authority of his reductive approach, Nail repeats the dogmatic treatment of Hegel’s dialectic by Marx: Just as Marx extracted a“rational kernel” of the dialectic from the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s speculative philosophy, […] so the ontology of motion extracts from the speculative ontology of becoming the “rational kernel” of flux, resulting in anew historical materialist ontology of motion. (Nail 2018, 50) It can be concluded that Nail’s use of the term “flux”, reveals the weakness of his philosophy, which sacrifices the notion of complexity to authoritarian positing of being as “matter in motion”. The acknowledgement of its “historical and regional” (Nail 2018, 50),3 limitations does not mitigate the authoritarian reductionism of Nail’s ontology. 3 The term “regional” points back to Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” of Dasein as “the kind of Being we have” (Brandom 1983, 388). See Heidegger’s explanation of the term “region” (Gegend) in Being and Time: “Something like aregion must first be discovered if there is to be any possibility of allotting or coming across places for atotality of equipment that is circumspectively at one’s disposal. […] Thus the sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places– sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight; these are discovered in circumspection and treated distinctively in terms of changes in the usability of what the sun bestows. […] But this spatiality has its own unity through that totality-of-involvements in-accordance-with-theworld [weltmässige Bewandtnisganzheit] which belongs to the spatially ready-to-hand. The ‘environment’ does not arrange itself in aspace which has been given in advance; but its specific worldhood, in its significance, articulates the context of involvements which belongs to some current totality of circumspectively allotted places” (Heidegger [1927] 1962, 136–8). Nail does not seem to be familiar with Heidegger’s use of the term, when he claims that his “ontology of motion […] includes the largest possible region of being, excluding only the future” (Nail 2018, 24). This statement ignores the key role of the “totality” or “network” of “involvements” as acontext of “everyday equipmental practice” (Wheeler 2020) in Heidegger’s determination of “region”. The superficiality and inconsistency of Nail’s use of “regional” is also evident from 68 This shows itself in Nail’s treatment of motion which focuses on “some minimal kinetic attributes” of “historical being […], flow, fold and field” (Nail 2018, 31, 52). All of them “form the theoretical framework” of Nail’s theory of motion (Nail 2018, 30–1). Especially “the flow” is important for understanding Nail’s theories of migration, social mobility and borders (Nail 2015; 2016). 6 Social Flows and Their Circulation: A Challenge to Autopoietic Systems Despite its reductionism, Nail’s ontology of motion can be said to open anew perspective on social dynamics of migrations and borders. Research of these areas has aforemost importance for the study of societies as autopoietic systems (Echeverría 2020). In contrast to the approaches to migration as aresult of “the complex and dynamic interaction between all social systems” (Echeverría 2020, 122), whose inclusivity poses an alternative to “the exclusive logic of states that insists on regulating human mobility on the basis of amembership principle” (Echeverría 2020, 119), Nail bases his theory on “social motion” (Nail 2015, 7), which in terms of his approach, called “kinopolitics” or “apolitics of movement” (Nail 2015, 8, 21–38), exists prior to social systems. This motion is caused by “territorial, political, juridical and economic expulsion” (Nail 2015, 6) and has two major forms: migration and circulation. While the latter establishes “social formations” and “regimes” (Nail 2015, 3–4), the former generates “its own forms of social motion in riots, revolts, rebellions, and resistances” and demonstrates “the capacity of contemporary migrants to pose an alternative to the present social logic of expulsion that continues to dominate our world” (Nail 2015, 7). Social flows result from “expansion”, which can be “territorial” (e.g.the enclosures in early modern England) and include “warfare, colonialism, and massive public works” (Nail 2015, 22–3). However, it can also manifest itself in amore complex way, as an “intensive or qualitative growth in territorial, political, juridical, and economic kinopower” (Nail 2015, 36). All these forms of expansion engender “expulsion”, which is “not simply the deprivation of territorial status (i.e., removal from the his claims that “ontological practice itself is historical and kinetic” and that “regional ontology” is “rooted in the present, and thus can at most lay claim to asingle dimension or historical trajectory in being leading up to acertain region of the present (Nail 2018, 32–3). 69 land)”, but “includes three other major types of social deprivation: political, juridical, and economic” (Nail 2015, 35). As aresult, “expulsion” is primarily not aspatial or temporal movement, but a“kinetic concept” presupposing both intensive and extensive understanding of movement (Nail 2015, 35). These flows cannot be modelled as movements of material points: they can be grasped only in statistical terms as “variable data flows” (Nail 2015, 25). As “acontinuous process”, “amultiplicity”, they cannot be unified or totalized (Nail 2015, 26). Social flows bifurcate, which can lead to their “redirection” back onto themselves “in aloop or fold” (Nail 2015, 27). The repetition of this movement creates “junctions” which differ from amere “confluence […] of overlapping and heterogeneous flows” (Nail 2015, 27). Though the folding of the flow on itself is arbitrary, it “constitutes apoint of self-reference” because of “the haptic circularity” of the process (Nail 2015, 27). Junctions may produce “relatively immobile” points where “the flow intersects with itself” (Nail 2015, 28) and from where it can be controlled. In social terms, these points are moments of “relative stability” of territorial, political or economic character (e.g.house or city), or border walls (with watchtowers and patrol cars, etc.) with respect to migration (Nail 2015, 28). “Aseries of junctions” is linked in the process of circulation, which regulates the flows “into an ordered network of junctions” (Nail 2015, 29). Each form of circulation, e.g.the movement of migrants across aborder, includes anumber of “circuits” (“border”, “detention” and “labor” circuits; Nail 2015, 31–2). As aresult, not only aflow but also its circulation is adynamic process of considerable complexity. Circulation increases the power and variability of asystem of interconnected flows, thus causing their “expansion” (Nail 2015, 35). The movement of expansion is always connected with “expulsion” and has several distinct historical forms. The “centripetal” movement is linked with the territorialisation of earth and the rise of first centers of settlement. It leads to the arrival of agriculture and the expulsion of nomads from cultivated territories (Nail 2015, 39–47). The “centrifugal” movement gives rise to the old empires and their administration (Nail 2015, 48–58). The “tensional force […] held between legally bound persons” is generating amovement among numerous local centers of power “linked through aweb of juridical connections” which bind lords and their subjects “to apiece of land and its cultivation” (Nail 2015, 59–60). As aresult, the major “form of kinopolitical expansion by expulsion in the Middle Ages is juridical” (Nail 2015, 60). Finally, the expansion 70 achieves predominantly economic character of kinopower, distinguished by “elasticity”, the capacity of “anetwork of junctions to return to its normal shape after contraction or expansion” (Nail 2015, 82). Important features of elastic circulation are aquick “redistribution of people” (especially workforce), “oscillations” of asocial system and “asurplus of motion […] to fill adeficit or displace an excess to avoid social decline or collapse” (Nail 2015, 82). Each of these forms of circulation and expansion by expulsion corresponds to aspecific form of “the figure of the migrant”: “nomad”, “barbarian”, “vagabond” and “proletarian” (Nail 2015, 8, 130–78). These forms do not have “afixed identity”: each of them is “amobile social position or spectrum that people move into and out of under certain social conditions of mobility” (Nail 2015, 8). 7 From Social Flows to Borders Nail’s theory of social flows, their junctions, circulation and expansion is also relevant for the understanding of borders, which are part of this movement. Borders are not lines demarcating state territories. Also, they are not parts of these territories, since they lie “‘between states” (Nail 2016, 2). They are “fuzzy zone-like” phenomena of “inclusive disjunction” (Nail 2016, 3). States infinitely approach borders as their limits but can never entirely reach them, “because the limit is aprocess that infinitely approaches the point of bifurcation, like the slope of atangent” (Nail 2016, 3). Borders are zones of division of aspecific nature. In contrast to adivision as abreak or acut, the division performed by borders is called “bifurcation” (Nail 2016, 3). It “adds anew path to the existing one”, “diverges from itself” and produces “aqualitative change” of the flow of population as “acontinuous system” (Nail 2016, 3). As aresult, border is perceived as acontinuity by some participants in social flow and as adiscontinuity by others (Nail 2016, 3). Borders are in aconstant motion due to migration, circulation, geomorphological processes, negotiations between states or ethnic groups and changes of technologies of border protection and control. They can be seen as “motors, the mobile cutting blades of society” (Nail 2016, 7). Their dynamic functions manifest themselves chiefly with respect to social flows. Nail does not understand borders territorially, but as “aprocess of social division” (Nail 2016, 2). The border is in motion not only in spatial 71 terms (in spite of geomorphological divides or “border regimes” and technologies enforcing them) but also, and chiefly, as amoment of bifurcation, junction and circulation producing social division (Nail 2016, 2–8). Circulation of social flows is changing its course and intensity depending on the number and character of their junctions (Nail 2016, 29). It also changes the conditions and nature of exclusion and inclusion, because [i]t is amultifolded structure creating acomplex system of relative insides and outsides without absolute inclusions and exclusions, but the insides and outsides are all folds of the same continuous process or flow. Each time circulation creates afold or pleat, both anew inclusion and new exclusion are created. (Nail 2016, 29) Due to the circulation of social flows borders escape full control of state power. The divisions they make are not based on static binary oppositions but on dynamic multiplication of differences (Nail 2016, 8). Borders are limits of social flows and their circulation. They circulate social divisions and order the society spatially (Nail 2016, 8–9). Moreover, they can be said to “define” society by giving it “limits” (Nail 2016, 9). 8 Nail’s Theory of the Border Nail describes his theory as aframework for astudy of “the historical conditions in which empirical borders emerge across different social contexts” (Nail 2016, 12). This methodological assumption is supported by areference to Kant’s philosophy, which however does not seem to work in the wider context of Nail’s allegedly “materialist” approach. In Nail’s account, the problem addressed by his methodology is similar to that of the relationship between metaphysics and empiricism described in the introduction to the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of assuming that “all our cognition must conform to objects” (Kant [1787] 1996, 21), which prevents us from discovering “more general (apriori) conditions of knowledge” under which objects appear to us (Nail 2016, 12), we should identify these conditions as rules “expressed in apriori concepts”, to which “all objects of experience must necessarily conform […] and agree with them” (Kant [1787] 1996, 22). This speculative basis of Nail’s methodology is problematic because of its claims of generality and objectivity. These become more resolute 72 in the context of his ontology of motion (Nail 2018, 55), which develops amethodology called by Nail “transcendental realism, […] the study of the real minimal ontological conditions for the actual emergence of the historical present” (Nail 2018, 52). The vague statement of the purpose of Nail’s methodology– “to give adescription of what previous being must at least be like given that it appears as it does today: in motion” (Nail 2018, 52)– reads like aclumsy attempt to revise Kant’s apriorism by an approach remotely resembling Hans Vaihinger’s neo-Kantian “philosophy of ‘as-if’” (Vaihinger [1911] 2000). However, in contrast to Nail’s colloquial use of “like” (“must at least be like given”), which in present-day American English may acknowledge “the discomfort” as well as the “reinforcement” (McWhorter 2016, 218–19), Vaihinger’s use of “fiction” (Vaihinger [1911] 2000, 274) is based on aconsistent interpretation of Kant’s Critique, e.g.the “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectics: On the Final Aim of the Natural Dialectics of Human Reason” (Kant [1787] 1996, 638–62), where Kant almost regularly uses the adverbial construction “as if” which denotes aspecific methodological principle.4 The vagueness of the basic assumption of Nail’s methodology is increased by his idiosyncratic use of “transcendental” in connection with “regional” (e.g.“regional transcendental structure of our time– motion”; Nail 2018, 52) and defined as “aminimally real ontological structure of historical being– but not the only one. There are multiple coexisting real transcendentals; motion has simply emerged today as arelatively dominant and undertheorized one, thereby making possible anew ontological description of the present from this perspective” (Nail 2018, 52). It can hardly be justified by the reference to “the hybrid nature of ontological practice today” (Nail 2018, 53). The determination of historical conditions in Nail’s theory of the border is based on his knowledge and understanding of history which have 4 “Although in reason’s empirical use this idea can never come about [as realized] completely, the idea yet serves as arule as to how we are to proceed in regard to these series of conditions– viz., in explaining given appearances (i.e., in regressing or, in other words, ascending), we are to proceed as if the series were in itself infinite, i.e., we are to proceed in indefinitum. But where (viz., in [the realm of] freedom reason itself is regarded as determining cause, i.e., where we deal with practical principles, we are to proceed as if we had before us an object not of the senses but of the pure understanding. There the conditions can no longer be posited in the series of appearances, but can be posited outside this series; and the series of states can be regarded as if it began absolutely (through an intelligible cause). All of this proves that the cosmological ideas are nothing but regulative principles, and are far from positing– constitutively, as it were– an actual totality of such series. The remainder of these considerations can be found in its place under the Antinomy of Pure Reason” (Kant [1787] 1996, 649). 73 ageneralizing and speculative character. Although presented as “minimally real”, Nail’s claims of generality and objectivity of his theory are problematic compared with pragmatic methodologies in social sciences, for instance the use of “frame analysis” (Goffman 1974; Ogien 2015, 6–9). Nail’s theory distinguishes “four major social and material types of borders: territorial, political, juridical, and economic” (Nail 2016, 12). This tetradic structural and functional scheme of “border kinopower” (Nail 2016, 43) is based on the previously developed typologies of expansion by expulsion” and migrants (Nail 2015, 39–124; 130–77). Territorial borders are represented by “the fence” as “aborder regime that produces acentripetal social motion: the movement of flows from the periphery toward the center” (Nail 2016, 47). Importantly, fence, or rather “fencing”, is “not aborder that emerges from acentralized power”, it is aprocess of “centripetal segmentation that creates the conditions for asocially central power” (Nail 2016, 63). The fence is “avertical junction” (Nail 2016, 62) delimiting settlements, pastures, tribal or sacred areas (the last mentioned can be marked, e.g.by megaliths). It expels “the wild flows of the earth inward toward […] the pen, garden or avillage” (Nail 2016, 62). It defends the “centripetally accumulated stock” and “binds several social junctions” (e.g.houses) “into asingle circulatory social system”, e.g.village community (Nail 2016, 62). Political borders are represented by “the wall”, which “transforms” the functions of the fence and “creates anew form of dominant social circulation” (Nail 2016, 64). It “consolidates the centripetal accumulations of the previous fence regime into acentral point” (Nail 2016, 64), the city as an “urban center”, and generates centrifugal flows of economic and military expansion establishing an empire. Moreover, the wall directs the circulation of social flows within cities and becomes an important force transforming the society “into amechanism of transport” (of goods, armies, colonists, etc.) “in the service of centralized rule” (Nail 2016, 65). Juridical borders are represented by “the cell”, which was originally amonastic space of individuation and identification. These processes of the separation of individuals from social flows were dividing “human life into individual lives” (Nail 2016, 88). Historically, the cell can be seen as an outcome of the problems of mobility caused by the downfall of ancient empires. Its “juridical” kinopower stems from the “network of binding laws”, which in medieval Europe “replaces the central power of the emperor” (Nail 2016, 89). Nail refers to Perry Anderson who shows that under feudalism “political sovereignty was never focused in asingle center” and “the functions of the feudal State were disintegrated” 80 Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Brandom, Robert. 1983. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time”. The Monist 66 (3): 387–409. Chamayou, Grégoire. 2013. “Fichte’s Passsport: APhilosophy of the Police”. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Theory and Event 16 (2): 1–17. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Original edition, 1972. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 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In Guided Self-Organization: Inception, Emergence, Complexity and Computation 9, edited by Mikhail Prokopenko, 19–59. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Original edition, 1969. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78. Translated by Alessandro Fontana. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gamble, Christopher N., Joshua Hanan, and Thomas Nail. 2019. “What Is New Materialism”. Angelaki 24 (6): 111–34. Gershenson, Carlos. 2014. “Requisite Variety, Autopoiesis, and Self-Organization”. https:// arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1409/1409.7475.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2021. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Original edition, 1927. Hoffman, Donald D., Manish Singh, and Chetan Prakash. 2015. “The Interface Theory of Perception”. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 22: 1480–506. Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture. New York: Basic Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Original edition, 1787. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Original edition, 1965. 81 Lucretius Carus, Titus. 1916. De Rerum Natura. Translated and edited by William Ellery Leonard, http://data.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0550.phi001. Accessed 28 June 2021. 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Wheeler, Michael. 2020. “Martin Heidegger”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/heidegger/. Accessed 28 June 2021. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 82 “I am the Combat”: Hegel’s Dramatic Theory of Knowledge Vojtěch Kolman Iam the combat; Iam not one of the conflicting terms but both the combatants and the combat itself. Iam the fire and the water which make contact. Iam the contact and union of that which is utterly self-repelling. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 1 Introduction George Steiner once wrote that the rarity of Hegel’s style consists in his being “able to think against himself” or “to dramatize in the root sense of the verb, which is one of pure action” (Steiner 1984, 20–1). To illustrate this, he quotes the above-mentioned passage from Hegel’s Lectures on Religion in which Hegel seems to describe the “state of war” as the true expression of the conditio humana. Considering the role that Hegel’s philosophy played in the stabilization of the Prussian state or,1 via Marx, in the history of two consequent centuries of mankind, the suspicion might arise whether the terms used here do have dramatic value rather than some military quality. This would 1 It is, of course, unfair to overemphasize the brief connection between Hegel and Prussianism. Hegel’s career in Berlin began within aprogram of liberal reforms (including those of Humboldt) under the chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, and education minister, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, who offered Hegel the professorship there. The increasingly conservative tendency of the government following the defeat of Napoleon was by no means welcomed by Hegel, if only because he associated the idea of the state with the constitutional monarchy, by which the power of sovereign and estates was mediated. Hegel’s importance lies elsewhere, in treating the state as something of essential value, not destroying an individual’s identity but, 83 be in accord with Hegel’s other “war-like” strategies, most importantly the dialectics of “master and slave” (and the primordial conflict this differentiation is aproduct of), or his very concept of war– as means by which “peoples are strengthened, nations, which are involved in civil quarrels, winning repose at home by means of war abroad” (Hegel 2001, 259). It is mainly because of them that he is often seen as aprototype of aphilosophical cynic justifying negativity and violence instead of truth and peace. At the same time, the given negativity plays an important role in what might be seen as Hegel’s most positive achievement, namely his autopoietic worldview. Here, the concept of the human world, or the Spirit, develops immanently from its own resources, and these resources are in fact nothing other than his own failures and mistakes. This turns the negative delimitation of Hegel’s philosophy inside out: the only thing by which we can positively measure the greatness of our victories and truths is the size of our previous failures and mistakes. It is exactly in this sense that, according to Hegel, Spirit arises from nothing and keeps growing while following rules of its own. In my paper, Iwould like to elaborate on this cautiously positive side of Hegel’s philosophy, going beyond the mere metaphor of legendary uroboros self-feeding on the tail of his failures in the more argumentative terms of epistemological fallibilism. Hegel, as Iwill claim, not only fits into the standard fallibilist picture, as represented particularly by C. S. Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but enriches it with what might be called adramatic twist. This is famously known from the dialectics of master and slave, but the pattern pervades his whole philosophy, endowing it with asignificant quality which is exactly that described by Steiner as akind of dramatization. Its main benefit is that it avoids the “positivist” reading of Hegel’s negative epistemology, as adopted famously by Marx and Engels. The direction Isuggest, on the other hand, is one that keeps the dialogical, or “war-like” quality of Hegel’s text intact, systematically entertaining the ambiguity of their readings for the sake of the continuity of our experience and its prospective unified approach. Scruton’s differentiation between allegorical and symbolic readings will be of some importance here. in fact, completing it. It is in this specific sense of Prussia as an example of awelfare state that one might say that “no individual did more to promulgate the dignity of the Prussian state after 1815 than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” (Clark 2007, 431). 84 2 I Know What You Are Thinking What fallibilism seems to say, at first, is apractical truism, or rule of thumb, rather than adeep philosophical insight: to learn something one must be prepared to make mistakes. This is captured in proverbs like “failure is the mother of success” (or “shit happens”, for that matter). But the doctrine itself wants to say more than that. It is one thing to say that we should not give up just because we did not succeed straight away (“never give up, never surrender”), and another to say that failure and success are different sides of the same coin, i.e., one cannot have one without having the other, not because it is often so but for conceptual reasons. It is already because of this that in fallibilism the negativity and fighting quality of knowledge has amore positive standing. Both Peirce and Wittgenstein ascribe to this, transforming what traditionally looked like afailure to be remedied into knowledge’s essential feature. Our propensity to make mistakes cannot be remedied but only used to our own advantage, e.g., along the lines of Wittgenstein’s intersubjective perception: “It is correct to say ‘Iknow what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘Iknow what Iam thinking.(Awhole cloud of philosophy condensed into adrop of grammar)” (Wittgenstein 1958, 222). It is easy to connect this doctrine with Hegel’s concept of Spirit, defined as Ithat is We and We that is I, which is basically acommunity of individuals who, in its most developed form, completed what he calls the Golgotha of the Spirit or the journey of the infinite grief. But beyond the obvious interdependency of both concepts, knowledge and error, what Hegel stresses is the intensity of the previous pain that provides for the positive quality of the subsequent success. This success is in no way guaranteed, as in the famous “high risk, high gain” principle, but provides the cautiously optimistic or realistic reading of the originally negative autopoietic enterprise. Thus, along the depictured dramatic lines, one can start with the idea that there is no absolute certainty in our lives and, as such, life is essentially tragic: we often fail and even must fail. But in this failing– and here comes the dramatic twist– sometimes the higher gain is won. It is only through this reversal that the new certainty arises, belonging to knowledge proper as opposed to its impoverished variants. It is along these lines that Hegel’s claim “Iam the combat” can be read as adramatized alternative to the traditional concepts of knowledge based on unconditioned certainty, prominently Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum”. 85 What Hegel’s version claims is that there is still certainty of consciousness, but only arelative one achieved in an epistemological combat and its dramatic reversal. Here, consciousness risks its primordial subjectivity where no error is possible, and so is not truth. The bigger good to be won is socially mediated knowledge, the Ithat is We and We that, where the “wrong” and “right” are the two sides of the same coin and the resulting certainty stems from the underlying self-corrigible structure of mutual acknowledgment. In my paper, Iwill not present Hegel’s theory directly but arrive at it in Hegel’s own method of immanent presenting, starting with standard approaches, such as Descartes’ idea of individual certainty, and refuting them in the next step by their own means. What will be achieved will also be aconcept of certainty, but this time resulting from the underlying fallible structure of our socially-based knowledge. 3 Seeing It Right Newton says: “The errors are not in the art, but in the artificers” (Newton 1995, 3), i.e., in the eye of the beholder. And this is quite in accord with traditional epistemology and its distinction between mere belief (doxa) and real knowledge (episteme): One thing is to see how things are and another to see them right, according to the correct art. But what such an art is, is quite difficult to tell from the point of view of the beholder, who is supposed to have both episteme and doxa and who, as such, cannot be stronger than his or her weakest link, which is the intrinsic tendency to err. If reality has resources that make us fail, it is avain effort to differentiate exactly what it is to see it right. The option entertained by the modern philosophy of both Descartes and Kant is to retreat to the very source of our sight, to the cognizing subject itself. If Icannot infallibly know what things are, Ican at least know something about my knowing them. And, maybe (just maybe), once Iwill be able to specify the indubitable example of knowledge about this knowledge itself, the rest will easily follow. This reflexive turn, trading the reality of the world for the reality of the subject, is almost didactically foreseen in the “discovery” of linear perspective, as the era which anticipated the dawn of the Cartesian certainty. Here, the things as they are are once and for all left to themselves and one starts with picturing them as they might be seen in the eye of the beholder, i.e., the center of projection. Brunelleschi’s experiments with mirrors, with which the whole enterprise 86 may have started, illustrate this focus on the image rather than, in some detail, reality.2 As aresult, we depict things as we see them in their perspective, through foreshortening, receding to the horizon, i.e., the line at the height of the spectator’s eyes. But do we directly see how to see the things, or is there some doubt about this seeing itself? Let us consider, by way of example, the elementary case of the square pavement, or pavimento, and the specific problem of drawing distances between the receding horizontal lines. How to get them right? Several “rules of thumb” have been devised providing approximative yet different results. Alberti’s essay Della Pittura (where some of these approximative rules are mentioned) is of key importance here, resembling the replacement of Egyptian mathematics by aGreek one. In asimilar way, it replaces rules of thumb by general truths that become rules again but that are based not (only) on some empirical observations but unifying reasons (Alberti 2014, 94–5). What Alberti did was that he took apicture of the constructed pavement from the beholder’s point of view and compared it with another picture of how this beholder looks at the pavement. In this, the projecting lines have been drawn, demonstrating both where the distances are to be drawn and why that is. See Fig. 1. Only now one can see why the parallel lines intersect at the horizon, the diagonal lines at the distance point, etc. These phenomena are not depicting something lying on the depicted pavement but belong to the given art of projection. As Wittgenstein would say, they provide ascaffolding for the world (Wittgenstein 2002, 76), present in the picture but not in the representing way: they do not tell us about the world behind the canvas but just show themselves. 2 These experiments are hard to reconstruct because we must rely on Manetti’s descriptions. But the point presented might be sustainable; see Edgerton 2009. Fig. 1. 87 This scaffolding, though, is not something incorrigible or certain, as Newton and Kant suggested, but contains an element of arbitrariness already stemming from the fact that we are not one-eyed creatures with the fixed point of view. As the history of painting illustrates, once the art is settled, there is always aspace for the alternative rules (such as orthogonal projection) and the underlying creativity. What Alberti showed us, accordingly, was not the apriori quality of some specific projective method but something deeper and more straightforward than that: namely, that the picture cannot be compared directly with reality, but only with another picture representing the other set of eyes. 4 Through Another’s Eyes The lesson, henceforth, is this: What Ineed to see something correctly is not amethod of cleansing my eyes from all the prejudices and biases (as Descartes’ clarae et distinctae and his universal doubt demanded), but just to subjugate my eyes to the eyes of another subject. The reality of the external world is always here but mediated by the reality of another. This another, in practice, might be another version of me, in the same sense in which Ican correct myself retrospectively, but such aself-consciousness always depends on aprevious encounter with another human being. With this consideration, we meet the first form of the underlying combat in an epistemological setting. In theoretical terms, what one does is replace Kant’s useless concept of athing in itself, not by athing as it is for us, but by acombination of both: the thing as it is for us and the thing in itself which, though, is again only for us. Together they form the thing “in and for itself” (Hegel 2018, 56), this time not guaranteed by the unifying powers of the transcendental subject but by this subject’s overall socialization in the dialogical structure of the Ithat is We and We that is I. This whole socialization, of course, might look like arather useless step as the original subjectivity is not overcome but only replaced by amore complex one. But that is exactly the point: the objectivity arises only insofar as there is another man providing the independent measure by which my subjectivity is assessed as right or wrong– compare this to Wittgenstein, who states that “it is not possible to obey arule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying arule would be the same thing as obeying it” (Wittgenstein 1958, 81). This measure is arelative one, but it has acertain stability with respect to what has been achieved, and this is the very distinction of what is (objectively) right or wrong. 88 In Hegel’s dramatic choreography, one does not start with combat itself, but with an ambivalent concept of “desire” as acomplex label for our relation to the world that we share not only with each other but also with other sentient creatures. This allows him to describe the emergence of culture from nature in rather naturalistic terms as adifferentiation between desires, including beliefs as desires to know, in the immediate and mediated form. Brandom’s key point is this: One way the difference that matters between things like itches and things like desires emerges concerns the possibility of mistakes. The notion of felt satisfaction, of relief from amotivating pressure, includes an element of immediacy as incorrigibility. The organism cannot be mistaken about whether its itch has been relieved. But Ido not always and automatically know whether Ihave gotten what Iwant. (Brandom 2011, 75) The difference between what Iwant and what Iget is not sharply delineated, since Ican easily persuade myself that Igot exactly what Iwanted no matter how Ifeel about it. But if Iam about to achieve knowledge proper, this cannot be atypical option. The way out is to let my desires be mediated by another subject. The benefits of this resignation regarding the immediacy of my desires consists in extending what Ican desire over the immediate moment. If Idesire what you desire and take you as authoritative for what it is to satisfy this desire of mine, Ican overcome my old sentient self. In this, as Hegel put it, “desire acquires the breadth of being not only the desire of aparticular individual but containing within itself the desire of another” (Hegel 2007, 161). To this, Ineed you, both as homogenous with me, by being another subject, and as asubject independent of my immediacy. The taming of the eye is, in fact, acase of taming subjective desires by social interaction, i.e., by making them subjective in abroader sense of the word. The universality of knowledge is nothing more than the generalization of my subjective point-of-view in this inter-subjective direction. 5 Tragedy’s Transformative Powers This brings us to the dialectics of master and slave as the founding act of culture. Here, one starts with the subject’s desire to arrive at the right way of seeing how things are, for which the subjectivity of another represents aradical challenge. In this, Ican well acknowledge that in specifying how 89 the world is Ineed the help of others, but can still believe that, by using them cunningly, Iwill arrive at acertainty in which they play only the subordinate role of being the vehicles of my newly achieved knowledge or the satisfaction of my desire to know. In this sense, one is “certain of itself but not of the other, and for that reason its own certainty of itself is still without truth” (Hegel 2018, 111). As such, one must engage in a“life and death struggle” in which one’s claim for certainty prevails. Thus, it is the presupposition of the whole story rather than alesson taken from it that one must engage in alife and death struggle if one wants to be aperson in the full-fledged sense. Without such arisk, one will not be able to recognize the benefits of mediated desire and will merely live in the present as flowers and (lower) animals do. To be more than that, one must, in William James’ words, meet the other people half-way in the same sense in which one cannot appreciate the company of gentlemen without starting to behave like one (James 1997, 69–92, 86, 89). James’ “better risk loss of truth than chance of error” is aquite suitable (though ambivalent) motto for the whole presupposition (James 1997, 88), if only for the fact that to gain something here means also to lose something, namely the original certainty of immediately and unquestionably given. The lesson proper of the whole dialectics, thus, is that of the person who risked his life and won, and, as such, wants to have the benefits of both the eyes of another (who is not killed but kept alive to serve) and the immediate certainty of the world which his new servant, in accord with the original demand, adapts to master’s eyes’ immediate desire. In this, the social, mediated nature of knowledge is already acknowledged, but in aparasitic way that somehow repeats the original idea of pure subjectivity being the true source of knowledge. This is, let us say, for the fighting or military part of the whole story. Now, in akind of ironical twist, the true dramatic part of Hegel’s story comes forward when for the master beholder this part results in the old stage in which he only thinks to be the measure of all things while, in fact, he is, as such, only thanks to another subject, the servant beholder, who “works on the thing” and thus contributes to the immediate satisfaction of the master’s desires. The old stage, however, does not repeat itself as such, because the master’s old immediacy is his private phantasy defined with respect to the mediacy of the servant. Since the servant, unlike the master, is not immediately satisfied by the things he produces, his “work is desire held in check” (Hegel 2007, 115), which leads, via the thus discovered phenomenon of “deferred gratification”, to the servant’s Bildung. Part 2 Narratives of Self-Creation and Self-Destruction 98 Autopoiesis and “Pure Culture of Death Instinct”: Creativity as a Suicidal Project Josef Vojvodík Friend, let this be enough; if you wish more to read Go and become yourself the writ and that which is. Angelus Silesius It was asong from the abyss and once heard it opened an abyss in every utterance and powerfully enticed whoever heard it to disappear into that abyss. Maurice Blanchot Since Greek antiquity, philosophers and poets have known of acertain tension between the creative life and melancholy. In the Problemata physica, afragmentary collection of short treatises attributed to Aristotle, philosophers and artists are characterized as melancholic heroes who lead avaliant but tragic existence, overshadowed by the eternal darkness of night, by the void: Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes? […] Any many others of the heroes seem to have been similarly afflicted, and among men of recent times Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, and numerous other well–known men, and also most of the poets. (Aristotle 1984, 226) 99 This essay is an attempt to reconstruct the relationship between creative forms of self-realization and the suicidal “Pure Culture of Death Instinct” (Freud [1923] 1960, 54–5). In this sense, tragic autopoiesis figures as alethal, sometimes fatal, vicious circle of self-construction and self-destruction, the kind of tragic symmetry of fates that unites Péter Szondi and Paul Celan. Péter Szondi (1929–71) was the son of Hungarian physician and psychiatrist Léopold Szondi, whose work in depth psychology led him to develop the theory and method of fate analysis (Schicksalsanalyse). Acomparativist and theorist of literary hermeneutics and interpreter of dark poetry, Péter Szondi committed suicide in October 1971 in amanner identical to that of his friend, the poet Paul Celan (1920–70), with whose work Szondi was closely engaged. The links between Szondi and Celan that make up this symmetry of fates are numerous and unsettling: both were of Central European-Jewish descent; both experienced persecution during the war; both worked in apoetics characterized by aesthetic passion; both suffered from crippling depression; both died by drowning– amirror– identical death. At the beginning of Hermann Burger’s novel Die künstliche Mutter (The Artificial Mother) from 1982, the protagonist, Wolfram Schöllkopf, learns he will be laid off from his job as associate professor of German literature and glaciology (the science of glaciers and natural phenomena involving ice) at the Institute of Technology in Zurich. He entertains the idea of committing suicide by jumping from the third floor over the university courtyard. In addition to the trauma of losing his job, he is plagued by achronic illness that he characterizes as amigraine of the genitals, an illness that makes his sex life impossible and his daily existence miserable. Asudden heart attack turns Schöllkopf’s mind away from suicide, and he decides, through various turns in the story, to subject himself to an (ultimately ineffective) psychotherapy treatment conducted by asecret society at the Artificial Mother clinic located in the abandoned Swiss Army tunnels of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. Schöllkopf’s aim is to revive himself, or more aptly, reinvent himself under the literary pseudonym Armando, but what he discovers there are possibilities of creativity and ingenuity hitherto undreamed of, beyond the boundaries of ordinary linguistic expression. These open up aspace for artistic self-determination– and, simultaneously, artificial reality– outside the natural world of social bonds and relations. Schöllkopf, alias Armando, will spend the last two summer months of his life in Lugano in astate of narcissistic-ecstatic intoxication where he alone is the subject, speaker, and audience of his monologues. 100 Most of Burger’s works revolve around the question of death, athrough line that begins with his very first prose text and continues to Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), acollection of aphorisms that was his last published work. It is as if the whole of his literary (self-) creation were simply aconfirmation of Walter Benjamin’s assertion in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”: Modernity must stand under the sign of suicide, an act which seals aheroic will that makes no concession to amentality inimical toward this will. Such aresignation is not resignation but heroic passion. It is the achievement of modernity in the realm of the passions. (Benjamin [1938] 2006, 104) Just as Benjamin carries on the age-old tradition of heroizing death, identifying it as the “signature of modernity”, so too does Burger carry on the Platonic tradition of philosophical existence as ars philosophandi, and with it the notion of ars moriendi. While Schöllkopf-Armando never commits suicide by jumping from his university window, Burger himself, on 28 February 1989, would take his own life by overdosing on sleeping tablets. It was the death of awriter who understood his work not only as aform of existence, but as aprocess of self-creation through words, aprocess that carried with it both the opportunity and risk of becoming a“man made only of words”. It is in these terms that Burger beckons to the reader in an essay of the same title (“Der Mann der nur aus Wörtern besteht”, 1968): “Come with me! Come with me to the realm of words! Come with me and become aman who consists only of words!” (Burger 1983, 240).1 In Hermann Burger (1942–89) were combined the sensibilities of aliterary scholar, associate professor of German literature, poet and novelist. He was, we can safely say, the very model of autopoietic self-constitution by means of intense self-reflection, and by way of explicitly autobiographical subject matter. In this, of course, he was not alone, nor is it difficult to find similar examples: aliterary scholar, for instance, who also produced literary works, or an art scholar who produced art. In Burger’s semi-autobiographical fictional works, however, the theme of self-constitution is closely intertwined with that of self-destruction, in amanner reminiscent of the works 1 Komm mit! Komm mit ins Reich der Wörter! Komm mit und werde ein Mann, der nur aus Wörtern besteht! 101 of Heinrich von Kleist (his favourite author). If Burger seems particularly representative of this kind of gesture it is also by virtue of his intense reflections on the relationship between the literary text and its critical and scholarly reception. At the end of his lecture on “Poetic and Scholarly Language”, delivered on 15 February 1983 at the Hochschule für Wirtschaftsund Sozialwissenschaften in St. Gallen, Burger states: Whether Ibase my work– and it’s not so long ago one spoke of an “art of interpretation”– on agiven text or on the non-linguistic reality of my experiences, emotions, memories, or dreams, creativity plays an equally important role. The discoveries of the writer correspond to the investigations of the scholar, the concept to the method– one takes its place in relation to the other. It is only primary and secondary literature that should never cross paths. The pursuit of understanding and interpretation are diametrically opposed to poēsis, which means creating, making. The ideal reader, writes Novalis, is an extension of the author, extending and illuminating that realm on whose darkness the opus is nourished.2 (Burger 2010, 40) The invitation that is extended to us by this “man made only of words”– “Come with me! Come with me to the realm of words!”– is also achallenge. It dares us to enter aspace of seclusion between the extremes of life and death, an existence poised between painstaking virtuosity and loss of control, between the balancing act and the precipitous fall, between the loss of self and its creation in the written text. As author of astudy on the poetry of Paul Celan (Burger 1974), Burger knew that the “realm of words” is also atreacherous domain of the unspeakable, of silence and enigma, into which the poet can only enter using his wordkey. It is akey with which, as Celan writes in his poem With aVariable Key (Mit wechselndem Schlüssel), “you unlock the house in which drifts the 2 Ob ich bei meiner Arbeit– und es ist noch gar nicht so lange her, da hat man von einer “Kunst der Interpretation” gesprochen– von einem gegebenen Text oder von der außersprachlichen Realität meiner Erfahrungen, Emotionen, Erinnerungen, Träume ausgehe: Der Einsatz von Kreativität bleibt gleich hoch, der Sachermittlung des Wissenschaftlers entspricht die Recherche des Schriftstellers, der Methode die Konzeption, das eine hat neben dem anderen Platz, nur in die Quere kommen sollten sich Primär– und Sekundärliteratur nicht. Das Verstehen– und Deutenwollen ist der– was heißt das Machen, Verfertigen– diametral entgegengesetzt. Der ideale Leser, sagt Novalis, sei der erweiterte Autor. Er erweitert und erhellt ihn um jene Zone, von deren Dunkel sich das opus nährt. 102 snow of that left unspoken”. Access to this house is invariably associated with the experience of injury and pain: Mit wechselndem Schlüssel schließt du das Haus auf, darin der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt. Je nach dem Blut, das dir quillt aus Aug oder Mund oder Ohr, wechselt dein Schlüssel. Wechselt dein Schlüssel, wechselt das Wort, das treiben darf mit den Flocken. Je nach dem Wind, der dich fortstößt, ballt um das Wort sich der Schnee. (Celan 2003, 74) With avariable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear. You vary the key, you vary the word that is free to drift with the flakes. What snowball will form round the word depends on the wind that rebuffs you. (Celan 1972, 39) In his analysis of Celan’s poem, Burger writes: With bleeding eye, ear and mouth, the poet also experiences and articulates, before even commencing with his poetic work, akind of bleeding language– bleeding in the sense of an injured and “open” language. The variable key opens not only the house of the silenced, but also, as is clearly stated at the beginning of the second stanza, the house of language.3 (Burger 1974, 89) 3 Mit dem blutüberströmten Auge, dem Ohr und dem Mund erfährt und artikuliert der Dichter, noch bevor er zur poetischen Gestaltung ansetzt, auch eine blutende Sprache, und zwar im doppelten Sinne: eine verletzte und eine ”offene“ Sprache. Der wechselnde Schlüssel erschließt nicht nur das Haus des Verschwiegenen, sondern auch, wie der Anfang der zweiten Strophe deutlich sagt, das Haus der Sprache. 103 Poetic creation, as aform of self-reconstruction by means of an aesthetic act based on language (“the house in which / drifts the snow of that left unspoken”),4 engenders aform of mental space. However, this creative activity seems to be overshadowed at all times by the idea of self-destruction, and through it aconsciousness of the agonistic Self. Snow drifts not only through this poem but through the whole of Celan’s works (acollection of seventy poems from 1967–8 was given the title Schneepart, or Snow Part). Snow is acipher standing not only for silence and ineffability, but also cold, mortality, lifelessness, death and the dead, as we find in the final poem Inselhin (22 June 1954): “masters of ice and stone” (“Meister vom Eis und vom Stein”; Celan 2003, 88). Silvio Vietta has shown how this is related to the characteristically romantic theme of nihilism (1992, 182–4), conveyed by metaphors of dormant light, cold and ice, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s celebrated painting The Sea of Ice: The Wreck of the Hope (1823–4). The painting depicts aship buried in huge ice floes, aterrifying symbol of human desolation and the glaciation of the world. In Celan’s poem Weggebeizt (Etched Away From), the “realm of words” is imagined in geophysical terms as “the hospitable / glacier rooms and tables” (Celan 1972, 84),5 arealm of unadulterated spirituality and words of crystalline clarity, arealm beyond the human. However, this point suprême of poetry is anon-human realm of pure negativity: “Whirled / clear, free / your way through the human shaped snow, / the penitents’ snow” (Celan 1972, 84). The whiteness of snow becomes asignature of the nothingness and “cosmic negation”, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space: “snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As aresult of this universal whiteness, we feel aform of cosmic negation in action” (Bachelard 1994, 40–1). Bachelard quotes from Rimbaud’s Les déserts de l’amour: “It was like awinter’s night, with snow to stifle the world for certain” (“C’ était comme une nuit d’ hiver, avec une neige pour étouffer le monde décidément”; Bachelard 1994, 40–1). In his renowned book Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur 4 Jean Firges (1962, 263) interprets the motifs of “house” and “key” in Celan’s poem in relation to Heidegger’s proposition in his “Letter on Humanism”: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech” (Heidegger 1977, 193). 5 “zu den gastlichen / Gletscherstuben und “tischen” (Celan 2003, 180–1). 104 Stilpsychologie)– abook that would prove influential on the development of artistic modernism– Wilhelm Worringer considers aprinciple of abstraction (the “urge to abstraction” or “Abstraktionsdrang”) that aims at the purification of life: the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity. […] The simplest formula that expresses this kind of aesthetic experience runs: Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in asensuous object diverse from myself, to empathize myself into it. (Worringer [1908] 1997, 4–5) Abstraction as aprinciple of modernity finds its most intense expression in inorganic crystalline forms. According to Siegfried K. Lang, the exclusionary aspect of the biosphere represents “acreative variant of the instinct of death, one that, in fiction dealing with ‘small deaths’, anticipates the inevitable great death” (Lang 2002, 101).6 Even more radically, Maurice Blanchot considers the connection between life and writing, between life and creation, to be arisky one. He speaks of acertain ambivalence, and of the proximity of writing (and creation) to death.7 This is one of the main themes of his book The Space of Literature (L’espace littéraire, 1955), especially the fourth chapter, The Work and Death’s Space. Here, the elementary experience and essence of literature is this experience of nothingness, creeping continuously and inescapably into the rift between speaker and the spoken, as Blanchot writes in his essay “Literature and the Right to Death” (“La littérature et le droit à la mort”): Language can only begin with the void; no fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself. Negation is tied to language. When Ifirst begin, Ido not speak in order to say something, rather anothing demands to speak, nothing speaks, nothing finds its being in speech and the being of speech is nothing. (Blanchot [1948] 1999b, 381) 6 Der Abstraktionstrieb entpuppt sich als schöpferische Variante des Todestriebes, der in der Fiktion der “kleinen Tode” den unausweichlichen großen Tod vorwegnimmt. 7 It should be added that Blanchot’s interpretation of the alliance between literature (as writing) and death is influenced by Hegel’s idea of the end of art– albeit in the form of aconcept distinctly Blanchot’s, especially in the essay “Literature and the Right to Death”. 105 Perhaps writing, artistic creation, and artistic existence in the broadest sense are all connected to what Wilhelm Szilasi calls “dangerous being” (“gefährliches Dasein”) in his book Power and Powerlessness of the Mind (Macht und Ohnmacht des Geistes). “The melancholy artist”, he writes, “must endure the oppressive ‘no further’ with every completion and glimpse into the translucent incomprehensibility of being, which renders every completion incomplete” (Szilasi 1946, 302–3). At the end of the book, Szilasi returns to the melancholy of creators and philosophers and sees in it the intrinsic essence of both the philosophical and poetic existence. Melancholy places the philosopher, like the artist, in asituation of isolation and disappearance from the world (“Verschwinden für diese Welt”), or else it causes the world itself to disappear (“Verschwindenlassen der Welt”; Szilasi 1946, 302). Melancholy, however, plays arole in founding what Szilasi calls the “power of the spirit” (“Macht des Geistes”), apower that arises, paradoxically, from the very state of helplessness– or, more precisely, from the renunciation of one’s own power. The idea that creativity has apotential, as it becomes more intense, to change into self-destruction– or more aptly, that it has arole in sublimating and delaying suicide (however futile)– are ideas that have asingular place in the philosophy of life of the 20th century. In the introduction to his book Levels of Organic Life and the Human (Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch), Helmuth Plessner writes, “Modern times culminated in the concept of life; […] life, the demonically playful and unconsciously creative” (Plessner [1928] 2019, 1).8 There is another commonality that unites Burger, Celan, and Szondi. In addition to the fact that each of these authors chose to die by their own hand, they also prove quite difficult to classify, except perhaps for acommon solitude, authenticity, personal charisma, and ultimately atragic broken spirit. Burger’s dissertation, which he wrote on Celan’s poetry, as well as his own novels and poems in prose, reveal the extent of Celan’s influence on his work. It was not only Celan’s poetry or poetic language that shaped Burger, but also the world of his poetry: aclosed and solipsistic world concept. Burger is also linked to Szondi through 8 The philosopher Alfred Seidel (1895–1924) writes on creativity as a“sublimation of suicide” in fragments published by his estate. After his suicide, Seidel’s book Consciousness as Doom (Bewusstsein als Verhängnis, 1927) was published by Hans Prinzhorn. In acomprehensive introduction to Seidel’s book, Hans Prinzhorn also deals with the context of the pessimistic philosophy of life (“Lebensphilosophie”), which was for Seidel– as for Schopenhauer– essential for his thinking, via Ludwig Klages, Georg Simmel, and initially Oswald Spengler (Prinzhorn 1927, 46–68). 112 Celan. What accounts for the tragic symmetry of their fates? Was it their shared Central European-Jewish background, the Nazi persecution? Was it ashared aesthetic passion and awareness of the tragic dialectic of modernity? Or was it acrippling depression, culminating in their mirror-image suicides? At the age of twenty-three Szondi’s writings were focused on the dialectical conception of history as atension between connection and unity (in antiquity), and between connection and fragmentation (in modernity). We find these preoccupations, for example, in his term paper from the summer semester of 1952 on “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony” (“Friedrich Schlegel und die romantische Ironie”). Emil Staiger considered it to be apre-eminent work by ascholar whose ideas had already reached maturity, and he recommended it for publication in the renowned Germanist magazine Euphorion (1954). Szondi quotes from Friedrich Schlegel’s letter to his brother August Wilhelm in 1793, in which Schlegel describes Hamlet as awork on “heroic despair, that is to say, an infinite derangement of the very highest powers. […] The very innermost heart of his existence is afearful nothingness, contempt for the world and for himself” (Szondi 1986, 59). In his interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, Schlegel refers to his own situation and that of his time. The early romantic subject is, as Szondi writes, the isolated subject, “thrown back upon itself and becoming an object for its own contemplation” (Szondi 1986, 61). The subject of romantic irony, which Schlegel defines as the “continuously fluctuating of self-creation and self-destruction” (“steter Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung”; Schlegel 1991, 24), is asubject divided between the world and the self, between adesire for unity and adesire for an infinite world, between self-creation (Selbstschöpfung) and self-destruction (Selbstvernichtung), between the will and disbelief. Already in this early treatise, we find the central theme of Szondi’s life and literary work: not only afascination with fragments and fragmentation,18 but also akeen sensitivity for the tragic moment when self-confidence and self-reflection intersect, when the philosopher’s thought comes face to face with poetic sensibility. Szondi’s An Essay on the Tragic is also written in fragmentary form. In it, the author offers his analyses of the tragic in the form of brief comments, rather than elaborating them into full interpretations. Similarly, 18 In aletter to Emil Staiger dated June 1967, Szondi wrote: “the fascination with fragments has not left me since Iwrote apaper for your seminar fifteen years ago” (Szondi 1993, 226). 113 Szondi’s Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics as well as his Celan Studies were left as unfinished fragments. The notion of tragic irony also plays arole in Szondi’s theory and philosophy of the tragic. He understands it rather as adialectical phenomenon, namely as amodality of impending and actual destruction, amodality of dialectical nature. This is the moment of tragic-ironic reversal, when the tragic hero, in order to secure his salvation, embarks on ajourney that will ensure his destruction. In the chapter devoted to Georg Simmel’s reflection on “The Concept and the Tragedy of Culture” (“Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur”), Szondi quotes apassage in which he sees aconvincing formulation of tragic dialectics: In contrast to asorrowful fate or one whose destructive force is external, we characterise atragic fate as follows: The destructive powers directed toward abeing arise from the deepest strata of this very being and, with its destruction, afate takes place that is moored in the being itself and, so to speak, is the logical development of the very structure with the being constructed its own positivity. (Szondi [1964] 2002, 44) Simmel’s concept of culture is wedged between fixed forms of existence and the “flowing liveliness” (“strömende Lebendigkeit”) that opposes them, which is to say between, on one hand, asubjective life constrained by time, and on the other, its contents: the motionless but timeless creations of the human spirit (zeitlos). In the midst of this dualism lies the idea of aculture that Simmel understands as “the soul’s path to itself” (“der Weg der Seele zu sich selbst”; Simmel [1911] 2001, 194). This division of man between the objective culture of his material creations and works of art, but also religion, law, norms, science, technical achievements, and the subjective culture of human self-cultivation, constitutes adiscrepancy between material meaning and values on one hand, and cultural meaning and values on the other. In modern times, this rift between objective culture and the subject has begun to widen, and Simmel also sees this as atragic moment in modern culture: its self-destruction in the form of aboundless multiplication of its creations and achievements, one that can no longer be mastered. This is also due to the fact that “the inorganic purchase […] of abook for abook, awork of art for awork of art, an invention for an invention” (Simmel [1911] 2001, 219), is not compatible with an individual life that is constrained by time. The motif of tragic culture, which Simmel expands into the “pathology 114 of culture” towards the end of his life (Simmel 1999, 40), is similar to Benjamin’s idea of modernity as asuicidal project. The moment of the tragic belongs not only to modernity, but also to the life of modern man, which has afragmentary character– in the same sense that Simmel means by the title of his 1916 reflection “Der Fragmentcharakter des Lebens”. This is no longer simply aconflict between objective and subjective culture, between unity and plurality, but aprocess of fragmentation, alevelling down, which Simmel argues are symptomatic of modern life. The world is given to man as asum of fragments (Simmel 1916/17, 29–40) and this fragmentation, as Simmel wrote in The Philosophy of Money (Philosophie des Geldes), means “that the core and meaning of life always slips through one’s hand, then this testifies to adeep yearning to give things anew importance, and deeper meaning, avalue of their own” (Simmel [1900] 2004, 407). Life in modern times is afragment, for it has become amere “cut-out of the metaphysical absolute” (“herausgeschnittenes Stück einer metaphysischen Absolutheit”; Simmel 1916/17, 32). Simmel is also concerned about the tension between fragment and totality, part and whole, which he deals with in his essay “The Ruins” (“Die Ruine”). In Simmel’s conception, the ruin is both the “present form of the past” and aproof of nature’s victory over the artefact, born of the activity of the creative spirit. As afragment of the former whole, the ruin is asign of acollapsed totality. Human creation eventually becomes anatural “product” again, apart of nature that triumphs over the idea that its human creator “imposed” on the material (Simmel [1911] 1958, 371–85). Szondi’s sentence in his essay on Schlegel’s romantic irony that “the essence […] of modernity is its dismemberment” (Szondi 1986, 58–9) foreshadows the tragic fragmentation of Szondi’s own work and life. His interpretation of Celan’s poem You Lie (Du liegst), which has provoked lively discussion and controversy to this day, also remains afragment (Burdorf 2014, 409–26; Brandes 2003, 175–95; Scheuer 1995, 1–15). Originally with the title Winter Poem (Wintergedicht; Szondi 2003, 85), Celan wrote it during his visit to Berlin on 22–23 December 1967. It would later be included in the posthumously published collection Snow Part (Schneepart, 1971). DU LIEGST im großen Gelausche, umbuscht, umflockt. Geh du zur Spree, geh zur Havel, geh zu den Fleischerhaken, 115 zu den roten Äppelstaken aus Schweden— Es kommt der Tisch mit den Gaben, er biegt um ein Eden— Der Mann ward zum Sieb, die Frau mußte schwimmen, die Sau, für sich, für keinen, für jeden— Der Landwehrkanal wird nicht rauschen. Nichts stockt. (Celan 2003, 315) YOU LIE amid agreat listening, enbushed, enflaked. Go to the Spree, go to the Havel, go to the meathooks, to the red apple stakes from Sweden— Here comes the gift table, it turns around an Eden— The man became asieve, the Frau had to swim, the sow, for herself, for no one, for everyone— The Landwehr Canal won’t make amurmur. Nothing stops. (Celan 2001, 329) In April 1971, one year after Celan’s suicide, Szondi began working on his interpretation of the poem, which would remain unfinished. After Szondi’s death, the piece was first published in the literary supplement Neue Zürcher Zeitung (15 October 1972), and subsequently in his posthumously published Celan Studies. This would be the last text he worked on– Szondi called it Eden– before committing suicide. If Szondi holds aspecial place in Celan scholarship and in the hermeneutics of modern poetry broadly speaking, it is because he based his interpretation on biographical events – namely, on Celan’s trip to Berlin, on which Szondi himself accompanied the poet. Szondi recalls Celan’s visit to the prison in Plötzensee to see the room where, on 20 July 1944, an officers’ plot to assassinate Hitler was foiled. Those involved in the plot were caught and executed, hanged on butcher’s hooks (“go to the meathooks”). Celan also walked through the Christmas market, where he saw Swedish 116 Advent wreaths decorated with red apples (“to the red apple stakes / from Sweden –“; small wooden stakes for affixing apples to the wreath). Having neglected to bring abook, he asked if Szondi had one he could borrow; Szondi lent him recently published documents on the shooting of Rosa Luxemburg and Karel Liebknecht in January 1919. After the shooting, Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal (“the Frau / had to swim, the sow”),19 which appears at the end of the poem (“The Landwehr Canal won’t make amurmur”). Szondi brought Celan to see the building of the former Eden Hotel, which had once housed an officer staff and military unit that took part in the liquidation of Luxembourg and Liebknecht (Szondi 2003, 87). It is on the basis of this kind of biographical contextualization that Szondi builds his interpretation of Celan’s poem, in this way provoking adebate over the hermeneutic legitimacy of such an approach in the interpretation of aliterary text. Hans Georg Gadamer asked how much we must know “to feel that the poems have been in any way ‘addressed’”, and whether the interpretation of the poem depends on special biographical information and knowledge (Gadamer 1976, 124). Szondi’s intention was not to reduce the aesthetic and poetic complexity of Celan’s poetry to mere biographical events, but rather to stylize reality on the basis of mythical, biblical, and intertextual allusions, as well as paraphrases and quotations that move the relationship with reality to an anti-realistic level. It is clear from the typewritten manuscript of Szondi’s work how cautiously he worked through these biographical contexts. In the published version of Eden he notes: This biographical report (others could no doubt make similar remarks apropos of other Celan poems), is not intended as the justification for areading of the poem “Du liegst im großen Gelausche”. Rather, we might ask whether such information can serve to support any reading at all. To what extent does understanding the poem depend on aknowledge of the biographical/historical framework? Or, in more general terms, to what extent is the poem determined by things external to it, and this determination from without invalidated by the poem’s own internal logic? […] Yet Celan also saw, read, and experienced many other things during the same few days that left no traces in the poem. But the poem’s determi19 According to the documentation Celan read, one of the soldiers uttered these words just after Luxemburg was shot. 117 nation by everyday coincidence is already limited – indeed precluded – by the process of selection, which, no less than these more or less chance occurrences themselves, was anecessary precondition for the poem, part of its generis. We might ask whether the determination from without, the real-life referent, is not balanced out by the poem’s self-determination: the interdependence of its various elements, by means of which even the real events referred to are transformed. (Szondi 2003, 88–9) For Szondi, however, something else was at stake: the invocation of the two days he spent with Celan in Berlin, the invocation of “the experiences of his stay in Berlin” (Szondi 2003, 88). Szondi postulates abalance between external-determination (Fremdbestimmung) and self-determination (Selbstbestimmung), between the sum of real personal (non-textual) events and the artistic constellation they form in the literary work. Szondi’s text as awhole, as Jürg Berthold points out, was written in such away so as to evoke an atmosphere of intimacy (Berthold 1992, 94), and as amutual reflection between two different experiences: the author-poet on one side, the reader-interpreter on the other. They are divergent yet analogous experiences, not least in the way they reflect the threat of Nazi terror and persecution. It is the same for the text of the poem itself, as if it were mirrored on the surface of Berlin’s two rivers (“Go to the Spree, go to the Havel”), and on the surface of the Landwehrkanal at the end of the poem. At the same time, the ominous spectre of historical and political events is mirrored– as astrange kind of mirror paradox– in the “red apple stakes” at the Christmas market. Equally paradoxical and ambivalent is the motif of Eden, which brings together the biblical-mythical locus amoenus with aspecific locus terribilis in relation to historical events– events that, in 1967, were still lingering in anot-so-distant past. We find the same paradoxical logic in arapprochement of the Christmas market and Plötzensee Prison– the site (masterfully evoked in the text) where members of the foiled 20 July plot were brought to be executed. Both locations are projected metonymically into the material motifs of “meathooks” and “apple stakes”.20 Finally, we discover ahistorical-political 20 In 1956, Paul Celan was asked to translate comments into German for Alain Resnais’ documentary Nuit et brouillard / Night and Fog (1956) about the Nazi extermination camps. The film features footage in which the SS celebrates the Christmas holidays in Auschwitz, in the immediate vicinity of the gas chambers. In his book Hitler in uns selbst (Hitler in Our Selves), Max Picard interprets this phenomenon as aconsequence of the complete discontinuity of the modern world. Only in such aworld, where peace can no longer be found among humans, only the peace of inhumanity, instruments, laboratories, and factories, was such athing possible. 118 nexus at the intersection of two other images: on one hand, the man riddled with bullets (“the man became asieve”; and “the Frau– the sow”); on the other, the “meathooks” used to suspend the steel wires on which the Plötzensee prisoners were brutally hanged. These images are associated, respectively, with the events of January 1919 and July 1944, which can be read in turn as areference to the Second Thirty Years War (1914–45), the memory of which had been imprinted on the architecture of the city: the Plötzensee prison and the Eden hotel. The gifts that appear in the poem (“Here comes the gift table”) are also “gifts of death” (Berthold 1992, 17). “War is afurther experience of the gift of death [la mort donnée]”, as Derrida writes in his essay The Gift of Death (Donner la mort) in reference to Jan Patočka’s heretical essay “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War” (Patočka 1996, 119–37). For Derrida,21 death, mystery, and the gift form aunity. The gift is at first aparadoxical “gift of death”– paradoxical “Murder and Mozart, the gas chamber and the concert hall are next to each other. Or rather, they’re in one and the same space, at one end furnished like agas chamber, at the other like aconcert hall. They share asingle entrance, and it’s just acoincidence that they hustle behind its door for amoment. Mozart after or before people are gassed, Hölderlin in the knapsack of an SS man, Goethe in the library of the concentration camp guards– this is only possible in aworld where things are no longer here in their actuality, except without acontext: they are valid only by virtue of their incoherence” (Picard [1946] 1969, 58, 64). In his famous Death Fugue (Todesfuge, 1944), Paul Celan captured this monstrous discontinuity of music and killing that Max Picard writes about. It came as ashock when in 1980 the original title of Celan’s poem was discovered: Death Tango (Todestango). However, the name refers to the appalling reality that Jews had to dig their own graves in extermination camps and others had to play the “death tango” (Felstiner 2001, 27). Here Picard develops the speculative philosophy of German “discontinuous history”– but he was not the only one. As early as 1935, Helmuth Plessner published an analysis of National Socialism as aconsequence of the “belated nation” (The Belated Nation / Die verspätete Nation, 1935/1959). According to Plessner, Germany, unlike England, France or even the Netherlands, failed to integrate the legacy of humanism and the Enlightenment. England’s “political liberalism” and France’s “democratic rationalism” remained something foreign to Germany, so that, according to Plessner, it fell victim to the ideology of Great German nationalism, which was strongly resistant to the process of modernisation. Plessner considers the suppression of Catholicism by the Reformation and “spiritual homelessness” (“geistige Heimatlosigkeit”) of the Reformed Church to be aparticularly unfortunate obstacle to the integration of apolitical Enlightenment in Germany. And– as one of the most serious causes of the slowing down of the liberal contents of German political thought– the radicalization of philosophy in the destructive thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Plessner speaks directly of “the destruction of philosophy at the hand of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche” (Plessner 2015, 185). 21 Péter Szondi was one of the first to introduce Derrida to German literary studies. Shortly after taking over the professorship of comparative studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1965, Szondi began inviting literary scholars and philosophers from Europe and the United States to give guest lectures. Derrida lectured twice in Berlin at Szondi‘sinvitation. It was also Szondi who introduced Paul Celan to Derrida in Paris (Riechers 2020, 163). 119 because death escapes the give–take relationship, and yet only death allows this exchange. According to Derrida, this is the initiation scene of Western Christian culture, which Derrida interprets as “the economy of sacrifice”: For this is not just one theme among others: ahistory of secrecy as history of responsibility is tied to aculture of death, in other words to the different figures of the gift of death or of putting to death [la mort donnée]. What does donner la mort mean in French? How does one give oneself death [se donner la mort]? How does one give it to oneself in the sense that putting oneself to death means dying while assuming responsibility for one’s own death, committing suicide but also sacrificing oneself for another, dying for the other, thus perhaps giving one’s life by giving oneself death, accepting the gift of death, such as Socrates, Christ, and others did in so many different ways. […] What is the relation between se donner la mort and sacrifice? Between putting oneself to death and dying for another? What are the relations among sacrifice, suicide, and the economy of this gift? […] the possibility of dying of the other or for the other. Such adeath is not given in the first instance as annihilation. It institutes responsibility as aputting-oneself-to-death or offering-one’s-death, that is, one’s life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice. (Derrida [1992] 1996, 10, 48) Victims for whom? “For herself, for no one, for everyone”? It could be said that Celan and Szondi are also connected by what Jan Patočka calls “the solidarity of the shaken”: “the solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about” (Patočka 1996, 134). Du liegst im großen Gelausche, however, is also apoem that anticipates death. Both the poet and his interpreter would choose adeath by drowning, Celan in the Seine and Szondi, one and ahalf years later, in Hallensee near Berlin. How to explain their mirror-image suicides? Despite some mutual differences, which emerge in the correspondence (Celan and Szondi 2005), Szondi found his friendship and correspondence with Celan very important during the last decade of the poet’s life. For Szondi, Celan was apoet whose words created the world anew, as Szondi writes in his interpretation of Celan’s poem Engführung for the French journal Critique (Szondi 1971, 387–420), edited by Jacques Derrida. According to Szondi, the poem as awhole is arepetition of the creation of the world, agesture made in the face of– and in this sense because of– the death camps: “The reality of 120 ash, of the death camp and its crematories, only seems to prevent the advent of the word, of the re-creation of the World through language” (Szondi 1983, 259–60). Szondi writes about “the identity of word and being, and points to the accord between poetic reality and poetic text” (Szondi 1983, 250). The “re-creation of the World through language”. It is anotion that raises the clamour of the word against the lethal silence of the extermination camps– avocalization and medicalization of the world (the word Engführung, or stretto, refers to the composition of afugue). But it also raises its sound against the metaphysical horror and terrifying silence of “the endless cosmos” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”; Pascal 1995, 73). Along with the word, the world is recreated as amillicrystal (ein Tausendkristall). Once more, the word can be seen in semantic proximity to crystal structures: as aword enveloped in snow crystals (“What snowball will form round the word”), as acrystal of breath (Atemkristall), as glacier rooms (Gletscherstuben), alveolate ice (Wabeneis), and other motifs semantically related to crystals and crystallisation. The flip side of the creation of the world is its glaciation and petrification.22 Geometric-crystalline forms evoking lucidity, symmetry, transparency, and purification are extra-temporal, impersonal, and counter to life. Crystallization is synonymous with symmetry.23 The poet of this anti-naturistic “will to crystallize” is Baudelaire;24 his poem Rêve pari22 As Hedwig Conrad–Martius shows by comparing crystal and plant, the most complex attribute of all living things is self–regulation, autopoiesis, and self–creation: “It is not creation but self–creation that characterizes life. That is why life reaches its end where self–creation ceases (Nicht die Gestaltung, sondern die Selbstgestaltung macht das Leben aus. Deshalb ist das Leben aber auch zu Ende, wo die Selbstgestaltung aufhört). Atoms and crystals are subject to design potencies (Gestaltungspotenzen), which create and control them. They are formed by their own potential from formless matter (formloser Stoff) as shaped units (Gestaltseinheiten). Living being (lebendiges Sein) means self–creative autonomy (selbstschöpferische Autonomie)” (Conrad–Martius 1934, 60). 23 According to Niklas Luhmann, paradoxes produce symmetries that disrupt communication and remove differences. In this context, Luhmann speaks of the importance of asymmetrization: “Only with the help of such punctualization and asymmetrization can an autopoietic social system form” (Luhmann 1995, 169). 24 In his essay, Sartre very accurately describes the poet’s intention: “It was because for him metal and, in ageneral way, minerals reflected the image of the mind. One of the results of the limits of our imaginative powers is that all those who, in their endeavors to understand the opposition between the spirit and life and the body, have been driven to form anon–biological image of it, have necessarily had to appeal to the kingdom of inanimate things − light, cold, transparency, sterility. Just as Baudelaire discovered that his own evil thoughts were realized and objectified in “foul beasts”, so steel– the most brilliant, the most highly polished of metals and the one which offers least grip– always appeared to him to be the exact objectification of his Thought in general. If he felt atenderness towards the sea, it was because it was amobile 121 sien,25 avision of the transformation of the organic world into an inorganic-crystalline artefact, culminates in the Pascalian notion of the terrifying “eternal silence of these infinite spaces”: Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles Planait (terrible nouveauté! Tout pour l’oeil, rien pour les oreilles!) Un silence d’éternité. (Baudelaire 1975, 102) And on these marvels as they moved there weighed (without asound – the eye alone was master here) the silence of the Void. (Baudelaire 1982, 108) However, the crystal is an ambivalent motif in Celan. As ahomogeneous elementary and structured cell, it represents amicrocosmic building block, an analogon of inwardness, interiorization, and crystallization of time. It is aprotective monadic microstructure for “I” and “You”, as in the poem Schneebett (Snowbed). Crystals represent the process of emergence, agrowth from within, from adepth; yet it is aform of emergence that comes to an end within– that is terminated by– the process of crystallization. By combining the substance and the form, the homogeneous chemical unit of the crystal is always already finished. It can be formed again, but only by layering already existing particles of the same substance. It represents, however, the highest form of this process. With Celan, the world of crystals has aspecial affinity for death: Glacier rooms close the word and time, simultaneously prefiguring the grave, as in Snowbed: mineral. It was because it was brilliant, inaccessible and cold with apure and, as it were, an immaterial movement. Because it possessed those forms which succeeded one another, that changed without anything which changed, and sometimes that transparency, that it offered the most adequate image of the spirit. It was spirit. Thus Baudelaire’s horror of life led him to choose materialization in its purest form as asymbol of the immaterial” (Sartre 1967, 108–9). 25 This poem by Baudelaire could be read as apoetic conceptualization of Alois Riegl’s program Kunstwollen: “Only in inorganic creation does man manifest himself fully equal to nature; he also creates purely from internal excitement without any external patterns. Once it crosses this limit, it enters into an external dependence on nature; its creation is no longer completely independent, but imitative. (Nur im anorganischen Schaffen erscheint der Mensch völlig ebenbürtig mit der Natur, schafft er auch rein aus innerm Drange, ohne alle äußern Vorbilder; sobald er diese Grenze überschreitet, gerät et in äußere Abhängigkeit von der Natur, ist sein Schaffen kein völlig selbständiges mehr, sondern ein imitatives)” (Riegl 1966, 76). 128 The space of the poem, in this case Celan’s Engführung, is the space into which the reader has been verbracht starting with its opening verses: he is “‘driven’ into astrange and unfamiliar landscape” (Szondi 1983, 232). According to Szondi, the reader does not take the poem as object of his reading, “rather, he is transplanted to the interior of the text in such away that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the one reading and that which is being read; the reading subject coincides with the subject of the poem being read” (Szondi 1983, 232). The reader does not merely read the text of the poem or look at its images so as to be able to describe them; rather “the poet desires that he and the reader ‘go’ forward into the ‘terrain’ which is his text” (Szondi 1983, 333–4). “Read no more −look! / Look no more– go!” (Szondi 1983, 233).35 We might read these lines as achallenge to the reader to repeat the author’s own gesture: in this way, the reading of atext, its analysis and interpretation, may reflect the interpreter’s personal style on anew level. As Starobinski shows in his interpretations of Rousseau and Montaigne, their autobiographical texts implement aspecific strategy of self-reflection based on the reading of gestures: astrategy that is repeated in the work of criticism. Starobinski understands this gestural strategy and experience as aprocess of self-knowledge and– in the case of Montaigne’s Essays– agestural self-experience. In the end, he tries to turn awareness in on itself (“Iroll about in myself”), or unravel it like ascroll (Starobinski 1985, 225). The reader-interpreter of the Essays repeats these gestures internally so that, at the end of his work, he may unravel the texture of his own kinaesthetic self-experience and self-knowledge, according to Montaigne’s idea that “Every movement reveals us (Tout mouvement nous découvre)”. However, Szondi’s Celan Studies are also aremarkable result of the work of mourning by which Szondi dealt with the death of Paul Celan, the endeavour to build abridge to one who has disappeared, an endeavour that remained unfinished. More precisely, the interpreter’s creative gesture results in arepetition of the poet’s radical suicidal gesture. Amutual friend of Celan and Szondi, Jacques Derrida, wrote an aphorism about Romeo and Juliet that could well refer to the relationship between the poet and his interpreter: “Both are in mourning– and both watch over the death of the other, upon the death of the other. Double death sentence. […] They both live, outlive the death of the other” (Derrida 2008, 132). 35 Lies nicht mehr −schau! / Schau nicht mehr −geh! 129 4 Epilogue Eva Veronika Szondi, Petr Szondi’s sister, published her work in psychiatry in 1975, Suicide Among Melancholics and Schizophrenics in the Light of Psychoanalysis, Fate Analysis and Daseinsanalysis(Selbstmord bei Melancholikern und Schizophrenen im Lichte der Psychoanalyse, der Schicksalsanalyse und der Daseinsanalyse). Based on these three psychological models (psychoanalysis, fate analysis and Daseinsanalysis) it reconstructs the hermeneutical horizon of knowledge on suicide in melancholics and schizophrenics. Unlike psychoanalysis and “genotropic” theory, the Daseinsanalysis created by Ludwig Binswanger and his school examines the analysis and hermeneutics of forms of existence and the position of aperson in the world. From the point of view of psychiatry, Binswanger understands psychosis as atransformation of Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein). The primary themes of melancholy, for example, are loss, feelings of guilt, and self-blame. Time is not experienced as amovement towards the future but on the contrary as something dying away. In severe forms of melancholy, and similarly in schizophrenia, the past is overwhelmed by the present: the meaning of life seems to be cut off from the future. The space afforded to the movement of Being (Dasein) is progressively constricted, so that Being begins to revolve tautologically around itself, as in acircle. From the point of view of Daseinsanalysis, suicide is the last attempt to break this rigidity of Being (Eva Szondi 1975, 94–5). In the essay “Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin” (“Hoffnung im Vergangenen. Über Walter Benjamin”) Peter Szondi interprets Benjamin’s memories of childhood Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindhiet um Neunzehnhundert) as an attempt to save the past in the present, aparadoxical Futurum der Vergangenheit: Benjamin’s tense is not the perfect, but the future perfect in the fullness of its paradox: being future and past at the same time. […] Thus his understanding of utopia is anchored in the past. This was the precondition for his projected primal history of the modern age. The task is paradoxical, like the joining of hope and despair to which it gives voice. The way to the origin is, to be sure, away backwards, but backwards into afuture, which, although it has gone by in the meantime and its idea has been perverted, still holds more promise than the current image of the future. (Szondi [1961] 1978b, 499, 502) 130 This seems to restore the arrow of time towards the horizon of the future– but only seemingly. It is significant that Szondi refers to Benjamin’s Origins of German Tragedy (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel) in this essay, and to one of its motifs in particular, namely the allegory of the Baroque. Melancholy (Schwermut) and sadness– another of these key categories of Benjamin’s thinking– return not only in Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic, but also in “Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits” (“Benjamins Städtebilder”), where Szondi comments on Benjamin’s episode trip along the North Sea: “Melancholy sees only the dark side of everything” (Szondi [1963] 1986b, 140). From here, adirect path will lead to “aparticular manner of destruction that is threatening or already completed” (Szondi [1964] 2002, 55), as Szondi himself tragically understands: “But it is also the case that only the demise of something that should not meet its demise, whose removal does not allow the wound to heal, is tragic” (Szondi [1964] 2002, 55). Translated by Peter Gaffney. References Aristotle. 1984. 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He showed that there was no more aneed, on the one hand, to represent reality in an artwork, as had been common in early modern European art since the late 14th century, than to define art as art through its formal aspects, as was sought after in Europe as well as in the US in the early 20th century. The development of art in the second half of the 20th century newly pursued its philosophical meaning by transforming itself into aconcept beyond the form. For Danto, the eye-opening experience for such consideration was an encounter with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from 1964, at first sight indistinguishable from the Brillo boxes displayed in almost every grocery shop around the US. As Danto summarized it for The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: To use my favorite example, nothing need mark the difference, outwardly, between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes in the supermarket. And conceptual art demonstrated that there need not even be apalpable visual object for something to be awork of visual art. That meant 136 that you could no longer teach the meaning of art by example. It meant that as far as appearances were concerned, anything could be awork of art, and it meant that if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought. You had, in brief, to turn to philosophy.1 (Danto 1997, 13) Warhol, according to Danto, made art that looked like acommon commodity, therefore it looked like the outer world, but it was not representation thereof. The Brillo Boxes were also based on their formal determination as ordinary store bought Brillo boxes, but that did not determinate their meaning as art either. Therefore, neither representation nor formal aspects, according to Danto captured the meaning of Warhol’s artwork. Rather, the being of the artwork gave the meaning to its form and to its relationship with the outer world. In other words, the art made its own meaning outside any narrative secondarily given to it (Danto [1984] 1986, 111–12). Such self-awareness of art, according to Danto ended the master narrative of art history as the authority making the meaning for art. Thus the end of art meant the end of art history, because its ending allowed art to thrive outside its corrective narratives. Art history that ended was, in Danto’s view acoherent narrative evolving its methodologies in the same manner as Hegel or Marx considered historical development, which meant pursuing its own end (Danto 1985, 184–6; Caroll 1998, 18–21; Agamben 1999, 40). Danto formulated the beginning of this process in the writings of the 16th century Italian painter Giorgio Vasari, with continuation in texts of the 20th century art historian Ernst Hans Gombrich, born in Vienna and active in England, who was subsequently surpassed by American art critic Clement Greenberg (Danto [1984] 1986, 86–99). Gombrich in continuation of Vasari, as Danto stated, tracked the improving representation of reality in art as it gradually gained its purpose, which reached its peak at the end of the 19th century. This, at the beginning of the 20th century led toward non-representational– abstract– art, omitting the need to represent the outer reality, but still built on the thought of the formal improvement of art as its own meaning. In Danto’s view the formal innovation remained, only the representational orientated search was replaced by the purification of art turning into its own principles, thus was Gombrich’s art history 1 Danto dealt with such aproblem for the first time in 1981, in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. 137 surpassed by Greenberg’s concern about the Abstract expressionism of the US avant-garde of the 1940s and the 1950s. With Warhol’s art of the early 1960s this concept of art’s meaning as embedded in its form was nevertheless, according to Danto revealed as only apath toward the main goal in reaching the true essence of art, that being its existence beyond its formal existence. In Danto’s view, the end of art that occurred in Warhol’s work enabled understanding art outside its historical development, revealing its true essence without the need to create secondary narratives according to its formal aspects. In other words, the historical development, how it was created by art history, facilitated its own end by revealing the master narrative based on the research of the form as inefficient for pursuing its goal, that goal being to understand the meaning of art in general, because this lay outside the material understanding of art. When we take Danto seriously in his account that art history governed (falsely, according to Danto) the essence of art, shouldn’t we also ask what art history pursued by its clarification of art? Shouldn’t we, before saying that art history wrongly constructed the meaning of art, ask what was the meaning of art produced by art history? If we start from this premise, we can ask not only what is the meaning of art without art history (Snyder 2018, 205–10), but also what is the meaning of art history for art’s existence in order to reach its own meaning. Can we really say that art exists as itself only after the end of art history? Or does the possibility exist that this realization is only an outcome of the art historical narrative, changing not according to art’s own purpose to realize itself, as Danto suggested (Snyder 2018, 153–67), but according to the society producing the art historical explanation, thus how Niklas Luhmann understood the function of the end of art: as determined by the need to secure art’s own existence by denying its own meaning to gain it outside its premises? At the same time Arthur Danto diagnosed the end of art, Hans Belting gave thought to the end of art history (Belting 1984). He took asimilar approach as Danto by observing how the change of social structures gradually affected the abandonment of the traditional concept of art as aform. Due to this process art history lost its privilege to explain art, whereas its methodologies were limited to grasping art only as aform. When form was not the primary interest of art, art history did not provide ageneral approach to understanding art and accordingly, it started to be replaced by other methods, based on non-formal aspects of art, 144 art as such, because the indistinguishability of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from Brillo boxes in stores revealed the nonsense of art as existing only as the form. According to Danto, this negation was created as areaction to the master narrative of art history preferring the meaning of art as form (representational or non-representational). Klein understood the form of art as securing the existence of art as its own meaning before it was given into the social structures. The form became the meaning because art for its existence needed the interpretation of the society in which it existed as form. When the form did not become the work of art by its affirmation in its examination and remained only as the surviving form coming from different historical, cultural or ideological contexts, it became its own parody. From the standpoint of art’s meaning, form was aprerequisite to validate its existence in the outside word that secured it thanks to art’s visibility according to which– as avalidation of its existence – the art’s meaning was produced in an examination appropriate to the social structures in art history. Thus the essence of art as art needed to negate itself by visualizing itself as aform, according to which meaning of art was created in social structures by art history. In Klein’s words, the emergence of the essence of art “is beginning under our very eyes to substitute itself for the work of art”, and therefore, the art work is no longer an in-itself; it is the end of acertain process that may, in the retrospective view […] be called artistic creation. […] In this way one suggests that any phenomenon has two sides, one natural, according to causes, the other artistic, according as it is seen. (Klein [1962] 1979, 173–4) Klein therefore showed, in contrast to Danto, that the end of art did not destroy art’s form in order to demonstrate it as secondary for the consideration of art’s meaning, rather he understood the form as the outcome of the shift of the meaning happening before the making of the form of art: “contemporary art being what it is, the work only exists through aparadox, as if despite itself, by negating itself” (Klein [1962] 1979, 173). This means that the form is the emergence of art’s meaning in its intersection of art-as-art and art-as-social-existence, thus form was for Klein the key existence securing art as art as well as art in changing social, cultural or ideological conditions. The paradox to which Klein gave thought was thus the process of the autopoietic existence of art built on the prerequisite to negate itself as the stipulation for preserving itself. Therefore, when form disappeared from this process and the existence of art had to 145 be secured by life, life needed to become the emergence of this paradoxical autopoietic process, including its negativity. 4 The Dark Side of the End of Art Arthur Danto saw the end of art retrospectively, thus in the way in which it was possible to see it as an artistic process, as Klein argued. Thanks to this retrospective comprehension Danto posited Warhol’s art at the beginning of “Post-Historical” art as existing without any historical corrective (Danto [1984] 1986, 83–5). He was able to say what led to the end of art and what happened after it in order to make new art understandable for his own times (Danto 1997, 21–40). Robert Klein’s end of art was formulated in adifferent way, because it was not defined from aretrospective standpoint– for him, the end of art was happening now. Witnessing the end of art, Klein did not pursue the strengthening of the structures of his contemporary society not understanding new art, he was rather searching for his own position in social structures by trying to understand the meaning of the end of art through the disappearance of its forms. This is evident in his text “The Eclipse of the Work of Art” written in 1967. In the text Klein took seriously the avant-garde’s attempt to destroy art. He pointed out– in apremise similar to Danto’s– that the aim was not against art in general, but against the concept of an artwork. He showed that the need to destroy the materiality of art was caused by the consumption of works of art since the early 20th century, when art became acommodity that was technically reproduced to create the illusion of its accessibility to everyone. This process led to adeprivation of art’s “aura”, as Klein took up Walter Benjamin’s argumentation from 1935 (Klein [1967] 1979b, 177); awork of art because of its high status as ararity paradoxically lost its need to be presented as the form, because it was disseminated as its own technical reproduction (Benjamin [1935] 2006). In the 1960s, when art devoid of its aura in addition existed only in the closed “Artworld”– if we use Danto’s concept for those participating in art’s creation, display, examination and trade (Danto 1964)– it was newly eroded by the contemporary avant-garde as logically attacking the concept of the form as senseless, as shown by Warhol as well as Daniel Spoerri, as Klein pointed out (Klein [1967] 1979b, 178). Their art stripped down the relevance of the form as only an historical concept of art. Danto saw this process as finally getting beyond the form, 146 which meant the liberation of art; Klein similarly indicated that the form was inevitably destined to be destroyed by “our repugnance at certain embodied values,” because they were understood as “bourgeois” (Klein [1967] 1979b, 177). Thus we see the similarity of Klein’s prognosis with Danto’s diagnosis of the end of art in the 1960s. However, Klein in contrast to Danto– because he did not have the retrospective standpoint– asked what happens with art without the form as the emergence of its meaning between art-as-art and art-as-social-existence. Klein showed that attempts to end art by creating “anti-art” already existed. As in the 1960s, they were not actually aimed against art per se, but against the society governing the meaning of art’s forms. He stated examples in the works of Adrian Brower, Gustav Courbet and others, who were “showing indirectly, and sometimes despite themselves, that ‘art’ was elsewhere and could go on” (Klein [1967] 1979b, 177). However, as Klein observed, these attempts to end art in order to make it anew and by it support other than the dominant social structures were always expressed in forms, thus even though the art ended in the given society it always existed as amateriality that could have survived the end of art. The loss of form in the 1960s was therefore the fundamental difference from other ends of art. Klein knew that form after the end of art had to be demystified of its historical values (Klein [1967] 1979b, 183). However, this was possible only when the values could have been taken from the surviving (although parodied) forms, as he showed in 1962. Therefore, according to him two questions must have been asked before the eclipse of the work of art was taken as the given outcome of the then happening end of art: “Can one imagine astate of affairs in which art could dispense with works of art? Or can one imagine works of art that would not be incarnations of values and congealed experience?” (Klein [1967] 1979b, 183). Klein posited these questions at the end of his text and did not answer them. Hypothetically speaking, the indirect answer can be found in his suicide few months after finishing the text. We have seen that in Danto’s argumentation the loss of the form in the end of art in the 1960s led to the possibility to consider everything in life as art, thus as apositive (and desired) outcome: the consequence of the end of art was adifferent life secured by its rightness as the new meaning of art. Klein, on the other hand, without the retrospective view that would be “after” the end of art, took life as the now happening emergence of the meaning of art without the existence of its form: at the 147 moment life took on the role of art’s meaning instead of the form, life had to secure art’s existence. And at that instant: The inevitable came to pass: nowadays chance has full citizenship in the work of art, but adomesticated form of citizenship. Away has been found to limit the damage inflicted on the embodying work and to use tamed chance to disclose new aspects of art beyond the work itself. (Klein [1967] 1979b, 178) Klein paraphrased here what he talked about in Rome– that the given society provides the meaning of the art even after it ends. However, when the “domesticity” of awork of art is lost, its meaning is lost as well. This means that without the surviving form that could gain other meanings in other structures as an emergence, the art as art is destined to end permanently. In other words, for Danto the replacement of the form with life was aliberation of the meaning of art, for Klein the loss of form meant an impossibility to give art its meaning as life, because of its negative autopoietic character happening at the end of art. Klein’s text from 1967 might thus refer to the overwhelming experience found by him in the late 1960s: art as newly embedded in life affected life with its impossibility to realize in itself because it was existing without an actual form. Thus life as newly giving the art its meaning instead of the form– from which life could have distanced itself and the form could have survived in different social, cultural or ideological structures– existed according to art’s paradoxical need to find its meaning in social structures. When this meaning was not reached, art sought to end itself in order to secure its existence in different outward circumstances. This shift of art’s meaning from form to life may have had atragic outcome for Klein, regarding his own personal history: when in 1948 he proclaimed himself apolitical refugee in France with aresult of losing his nationality, taken from him by the Romanian government he, as he wrote in his biographical note in 1965, “remained without nationality until the present day” (Klein [1965] 1979c, vii).3 The following year Klein 3 Klein also mentioned other important events in his life: he was born on 9 September 1918 in Timisoara, in 1936–7 he studied medicine in Cluj, in 1937–8 philosophy in Prague, in 1938–9 sciences in Bucharest. During the WWII he did amilitary service in the Romanian army, then he was as aJew forced to work in labor camps. After liberating Romania Klein joined the Allies during the liberation of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In 1947 he finished his university studies with adegree in philosophy from the university in Bucharest and he was awarded aFrench Government Scholarship to study in Paris. There in the Spring of 1948 he proclaimed himself 148 received aprestigious research scholarship in Villa ITatti in Florence, the Harvard Center of the studies on the Italian Renaissance (Chastel 1968, 200–1). Klein moved to Florence in 1966, and the following year, on 22 April, he committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills (Hendler 2018). The circumstances as to why Klein killed himself are still unresolved today– as is most of his contribution to art historical discourse of the late 20th century.4 However, due to Klein’s lack of nationality to which he referred in 1965 and due to his witnessing the end of art of which he thought in 1962 and in 1967, we can see that he might have been caught in the paradoxical autopoietic process of art– Klein, without anationality could have not found the possibility to give art, now becoming life, its meaning in the given social structures, because his life had none. Nor he could have found the meaning of art in particular forms of life as in his art historical research, because any form of materiality after the end of art lost its meaning.5 Thus the only thing left was bare life as the emergence of art’s autopoietic existence with its negative mechanics in denying itself in order to secure its existence. This process, at the moment when the emergence of art-as-art and art-as-social-existence became life instead of form, led to the tragic outcome in Klein’s death by suicide, thus according to Klein only by Dadaists rightly understood way how to negate form in order to secure art’s meaning: The need to break with the work of art has been widespread since the beginning of this century; it has often been deep and sincere. Still, artists could not shake the feeling that it was adeath wish. Only the Dadaists, attested specialists in suicide, endeavored to satisfy it directly. (Klein [1967] 1979b, 179) apolitical refugee and the Romanian nationality was taken from him as well as the French scholarship. He then gave private lessons and took various jobs as washing dishes until he graduated from l’ Ecole pratique des hautes études, IV e section under the supervision of art historian André Chastel. 4 In 2018 the first attempt to research Klein’s importance for art historical discourse of the 20th century took place in Florence in the form of an international conference. Interest in Klein’s art history was initiated in 2013 when his estate was given to the library of French National Institute of Art History (INHA). Most of Klein’s work was devoted to studies of Italian Renaissance art. In 1970 André Chastel published Klein’s collected essays, titled La forme et l’intelligible. 5 As Klein pointed out in 1963: “Art cannot but end up as apresence, as athing– while remaining meaning insofar as it is the living commentary of aliving experience. To believe that meaning can fill that presence is an illusion, but anecessary one […]” (Klein [1963] 1979a, 198). 149 5 Conclusion Giorgio Agamben recently mentioned the above examined Klein’s text from 1967 as an early example of the decomposition of the work of art (l’opera d’arte) by art as “devouring what had always defined its basis: its own work” (Agamben 2019, 3). Pointing out Alexandre Kojève’s notion on the end of history in this context, Agamben inadvertently not only put Klein’s thinking into the framework of homo sacer, thus as someone who was deprived from his social status as it happened to Klein in 1948,6 but also into the context of the end of art opened by Arthur Danto in 1984.7 Thus if we understand such reading as related to the interpretation proposed in this study, Klein’s position in the discussion on the end of art– diagnosed by Danto as happening in the 1960s– can be comprehended in aspeculative character helping us to understand its negative outcome.8 That means when we are searching solely for the motives of Klein’s suicide his other biographical circumstances need to be taken into consideration. These are so far, nevertheless veiled in mystery.9 Thus for the time being what we can rely on when trying to understand Klein’s suicide is his lack of nationality and his searching for comprehension of art’s changes happening at the time of his death. These aspects– when taken from the standpoint of the self-sufficiency of art described by Niklas Luhmann and extended by understanding the role of art history as the basic instrument for securing art’s existence– can show the dark side of the end of art, missing from the enthusiastic proclamation made by Arthur Danto. Hence when we are considering the end of art, we need to see not only what it might bring for the future (for Danto the future was constructed retrospectively as an artistic process), but also what is lost in such aprocess, what is destroyed in order to secure the existence of the new. To put it another way, we need to ask what the end of art might mean for its art historical examination comprehended as afundamental instrument of its autopoietic existence. From this standpoint the concept of the end 6 For the notion of homo sacer see Agamben 1998. 7 For the intellectual relationship of Kojève and Danto see Cascales 2018. 8 For the notion of speculation in art history see Vellodi 2017. 9 Klein did leave two pages long suicide note addressed to his friend, Renzo Federici. However, in the letter he did not explain reasons why he took his life apart from acryptic sentence “Ihave many convincing reasons for getting off the train”. In the letter Klein mostly left instructions who to inform about his death and what to say in which language. Klein even referred that his suicide note was rather “abusiness letter” (Hendler 2018). 150 of art can carry atragic side when the meaning that should have been formulated in the given society by art history became embedded in life, as can be perceptible in Robert Klein’s cryptic suicide at the time when the end of art occurred without agiven retrospective development: Klein, in contrast to Danto saw only the end of art as the current emergence of art’s meaning, no “after”. In other words, when the emergence of the meaning of art became life, thus without any correction as aform, art as life negated itself as unrealizable in itself and led to its inevitable end. Robert Klein’s thoughts on the end of art from 1962 and 1967 thus devour Danto’s positive take on the meaning of the concept, because they show that it can be taken as beneficial only until the meaning of art lies in the social structures. In such apremise art’s autopoietic process generating negativity against itself is vital for the existence of art. However, at the moment when art, after its end is substituted by life itself, thus it is no longer secured by social (artistic) forms, the vitality of art is replaced by the tragedy of life. References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man without Content. Translated by Georgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2019. Creation and Anarchy. The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Belting, Hans. 1984. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? München: Deutscher Verlag. Belting, Hans. 1995. Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: eine Revision nach Zehn Jahren. München: Verlag C. H. Beck. Belting, Hans. 2001. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. In Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings, 101–33. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Original edition, 1935. Caroll, Noël. 1998. “The End of Art?” History and Theory 37 (4): 17–29. Cascales, Raquel. 2018. “The Development of the Sense of the End of Art in Arthur Danto”, Rivista di estetica 68. http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/3542. Accessed 14 May 2021. Castelli, Enrico. 1962. Demitizzazione e immagine. Padova: Cedam. Casa editrice Dott. Antonio Milani. Chastel, André. 1968. “Robert Klein (1918–1967)”. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 30 (1): 199–201. Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1964. “The Artworld”. The Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–84. Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1984. “The End of Art”. In The Death of Art, edited by Berel Lang, 5–35. New York: Haven Publication. 151 Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1985. “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art”. Grant Street 4 (3): 171–89. Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1986. “The End of Art”. In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 81–115. New York: Columbia University Press. Original edition, 1984. Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giannini, Giorgio. 1962. “Demitizzazione e immagine, Atti del Convegno indetto dal Centro internazionale di studi umanistici e dall’Istituto di studi filosofici by Enrico Castelli“. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 54 (6): 627–40. Hendler, Sefy. 2018. “The Brilliant Jewish Art Scholar Who Survived WWII and Killed Himself Once His Career Took Off”. Haaretz 28 November, https://www.haaretz.com /world-news/europe/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-brilliant-art-scholar-who-killed-himself -once-his-career-took-off-1.6697052. Accessed 4 April 2021. Iser, Wolfgang. 2013. Emergenz. Nachgelassene und verstreut publizierte Essays, edited by Alexander Schmitz. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Karge, Henrik. 2010. “Stilgeschichte versus Kulturgeschichte: Zur Entfaltung der kunsthistorischen Methodik in den Jahrzenten ab 1850“. In Die Etablierung und Entwicklung des Faches Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland, Polen und Mitteleuropa, edited by Wojciech Bałus, and Joanna Wolańska, 41–59. Warszawa: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Klein, Robert. 1979. “Notes on the End of Image”. Translated by Madeline Jay, and Leon Wieseltier. In Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, edited by Henri Zerner, 170–5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Original edition, 1962. Klein, Robert. 1979a. “Modern Painting and Phenomenology”. Translated by Madeline Jay, and Leon Wieseltier. In Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, edited by Henri Zerner, 184–99. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Original edition, 1963. Klein, Robert. 1979b. “The Eclipse of the Work of Art”. Translated by Madeline Jay, and Leon Wieseltier. In Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, edited by Henri Zerner, 176–83. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Original edition, 1967. Klein, Robert. 1979c. “Foreword”. Translated by Madeline Jay, and Leon Wieseltier. In Form and Meaning. Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, edited by Henri Zerner, vii–xi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Original edition, 1965. Kleinbauer, Eugene. 1971. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as aSocial System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Prange, Regine. 2007. Kunstgeschichte 1750–1900. Darmstadt: WBG. Rampley, Matthew. 2012. Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks. Boston, MA: Brill Publishing. Schinkel, Willem. 2010. “The Autopoiesis of the Artworld after the End of Art”. Cultural Sociology 4 (2): 267–90. Snyder, Stephen. 2018. End-of-Art Philosophy in Hegel, Nietzsche and Danto. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vellodi, Kamini. 2017. “Speculation, Critique, Constructivism: Notions for Art History”. In Speculative Art Histories. Analysis at the Limits, edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen, 203–24. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wood, Christopher. 2019. AHistory of Art History. Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press. 152 The Author in the Making: Ethos, Posture, and Self-Creation Josef Šebek When aliterary text comes into being– acomplex process that develops by stages from the initial project, through the act of writing, and on to publication and its reception by readers and critics– another entity simultaneously comes into being (or undergoes change). This other entity, no less complex, is called the author. In what sense does the work participate in creating the author? And how can this process of self-creation, or autopoiesis be made intelligible for others? In this study Iwill try to answer these questions with the help of several recent theories of authorship that explore the interrelationship between author, text, and social context. 1 Layers of the Author The conceptual history of Western literary authorship can be conceived as acomplex interweaving of notions originating in the ancient philosophy, rhetoric, and theory of poetry, spanning from inspiration to techné. In the early modern period, the development of the concept of the author would be influenced by certain key contexts, including the gradual formation of modern subjectivity, the notion of literature as an imaginative mode of writing, and the modern system of the arts (Burke 1995; Bennett 2005; Meizoz 2007, 33–46). From the 16th to 18th century the transformation of the author into the figure of individual creator and social agent was well underway, but other models remained firmly established: anonymous and collective authorship as well as forms of writing carried out on the part of auctoritas and precepts. In the second 153 half of the 18th century, anumber of new contexts– pre-romantic and romantic aesthetics, German idealist philosophy, and the new material, institutional, and legal frameworks of publishing– were integrated into the concept, so that the author figure was now seen as original creator and source of inspiration vis-à-vis the newly expanded reading public and growing class of critics and scholars (Abrams 1953; Tatarkiewicz 1980; Woodmansee 1994). By the post-romantic period of the 19th century, the centrality of the author had become firmly established. In the 20th century, however, the concept of the author came under attack from several critical positions, and the “struggle” against the idea of the biographical and expressive author has been one of the major tenets of literary criticism. One influential solution was to split the author into textual and extra-textual instances, with interest predominantly on the former, and theoretical focus gradually shifting from work to reader. Since the last decades of the 20th century this theoretical doxa has been undermined by scholars who believe, on the one hand, that it is imperative to reject the view of the author in the romantic tradition– or better, to historicize it –, and on the other that it is not particularly desirable (or feasible) to excise the author entirely from literary scholarship, and who therefore seek more sophisticated and layered models of authorship (Burke 1998). As this brief outline of the history of the Western concept of literary authorship demonstrates, the author has been “in the making”– in literary texts as well as in theory– for quite some time. Yet this making of the author is carried out also in different, related and equally important sense: the author becomes himself in the process of writing and publishing, as an agent active in the literary field and apublic persona, and also in amore general manner as someone who tries to achieve something and who is in turn formed by this endeavor. This applies to all arts and indeed any branch of human creativity; yet the author of literary texts– in complex and often indirect ways– achieves aspecific form of visibility. It is this aspect, the reciprocity or even retroactivity of author and work, that has come into prominence in recent theories of authorship. Here, the author is amediator between literary and social contexts, texts and publics, alocus where the literary and the social intersect and become intelligible. The point of reference for this concept is Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?” (Foucault 1979). Despite its strongly “antiauthorial” reputation, it is this essay that originally set the agenda for the historical exploration of the “author function” and of the discursive shaping of the role of the author in particular eras and milieus. This agenda has been 256 as acontinuous impact of rattles, which are closed, but coordinate and irritate each other. Language is adistinct way of structural coupling of psychic and social systems. The considerations of evolution as atemporal dimension of social systems are remarkable (Luhmann 2012, 251–359; Lee 2000, 323, 327–8; Mathias 2019). The evolution of social systems is not astory about the adaptation of systems to the environment, but about the adaptation of social systems to themselves, that is, to their own internal structures. Although social systems depend on their environment, which satisfies their basic needs, this environment does not determine the evolution of society. The evolutionary trajectory follows only from the operational history of each social system. Social evolution takes place in three steps– first new communications bringing variations into the system, then selection of these variations and finally anew state is created as are-stabilization. In time, one communication is chained after another, structure after structure, without anything predetermining the exact direction of evolution. The long-term joint evolution of social systems can lead to the creation of structures that are sensitive to mutual irritations and are able to process them according to their own logic. This manifests itself as structural coupling (structural correspondence, structure of expectations), which can take avariety of forms, for example, afunctional subsystem or an organizational system. Over time, we can observe agrowing complexity of society, which is reflected in an ever deeper and sharper differentiation, and thus in ahigher need for structural coupling. Luhmann’s social evolution is the evolution of the ways in which communications are interconnected, which has nothing to do with natural evolution. Therefore, there is talk of anon-Darwinian form of coevolution (Gren and Zierhofer 2003, 621). Luhmann assumes that society faces an environment (everything outside it) that is always more complex than itself. The result is agrowing complexity of society in the form of ever deeper internal differentiation. In principle, three or four principles of internal differentiation are offered– segmental, stratified, by logic acenter and periphery, and functional. The type of differentiation tells us how the society distributes and solves problems that occur in its environment. That is to which system it will first include/exclude. Niklas Luhmann initially anticipated three ways (Luhmann 1977), he later added the differentiation of center and periphery (Luhmann 2013, 10–166; Lee 2000, 327–8; Mingers 2002, 285; Seidl 2005, 35–6; Kessler and Helmig 2007, 245; Stichweh 2011; Roth and Schütz 2015, 15–17). All methods of differentiation can 257 be combined with each other; however, the decisive factor is which is the primary one– that is, according to which the communications are first selected (Roth 2014, 41–3). It is from this point of view that Luhmann identified four structural stages. Society (hunters and gatherers) was first divided into many internally equally structured and socially equal subsystems such as tribes, clans, or family (segmentation). Then, hierarchical differentiation or stratification prevailed in the primary position, dividing society into unequal parts such as classes or castes, which determined the lives of its members. The origin of aperson gave it social significance in various social systems. The social systems were not equal, but some dominated (for instance, religion). The unequal relationship of stratified and segmented societies led to another type of differentiation, namely to the superior, stratified center and segmental periphery (center and periphery), between which there was akey and institutionalized differentiation in the control of economic resources and information. This division has lost its significance due to assimilation and globalization. The hierarchical arrangement has changed to aheterarchical one. Modern society is characterized by the development of aprimarily functional differentiation into socially equivalent and operationally closed subsystems (functional differentiation). In recent years, consensus has been promoted on ten basic functional subsystems– political system, economy, science, art, religion, legal system, sport, health system, education and mass media (Roth 2014, 41–3; Roth and Schütz 2015; Plaza-Úbeda et al. 2019). On amore detailed level, Luhmann distinguishes between three types of social systems– (i) society, (ii) interactions and (iii) organizations, which reproduce in different ways by communication. [Fig. 3] The society includes all communications and automatically with them the other Autopoietic Systems Social Systems Psychic SystemsEvolution 1. Level 2. Level 3. Level Society Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interactions Fig. 3: Three levels and typologies of social systems (Luhmann 1996, 2; Kühl 2020, 391, modified). 258 two types of social systems. Communication creates the boundaries of society, there are no communications outside society. Niklas Luhmann understands his theory as atool for the study of modern society in particular, which is characterized by aprocess of increasingly sharp differentiation of functional subsystems (Luhmann 2012, 113–250; Seidl 2005, 36–8; Gren and Zierhofer 2003, 618–21; Mingers 2002, 288–9). Each subsystem, understood as aclosed communication network, has its own unique binary code, symbolic medium, program and function or agenda. The binary code determines what is good/bad, negative/positive, or acceptable/unacceptable to the system. According to this code, the subsystem communicates with its environment and determines what and to what extent is relevant to it and what is not. It is precisely in this way that it sets its boundaries. For example, for the economic subsystem, it is to pay/not pay or to have/not to have, for the legal subsystem, legal/illegal, for the scientific, truth/lie, for the political, to have power/not to have power or power superior/subordinate, and so on. Only communications that carry aspecific binary code can participate in the reproduction and operations of the relevant subsystem (all binary codes express belongs/does not belong to the system). Each subsystem has specific rules for code interpretation (program), according to which it sorts communication events and determines their relevance. The binary code is stable and characterizes the system, while the program can change, such as the paradigm in science, law in the legal system, or the monetary system in the economic system. This distinction between stable code and variable program allows for internal changes to subsystems. Each subsystem has its own symbolically generalised media, which mediate meaning within the subsystem and are also ameasure of success (therefore also success media; Lee 2000, 326). For instance, for the economic system, it is money (with income/without income), for apolitical system, power (winner/loser), for an education system, marks (passed/fail), for alegal system, the existing law. In an ideal modern society, all functional subsystems are equal, none of them is dominant. They are autonomous, everyone follows their binary code and program, they are not directly connected and they create an environment with each other. At the same time, they are perceived and their irritations can lead to resonance in the second system. Specific forms of structural coupling are created, where one operation can have the nature of two/more communications in two/more subsystems. For example, the economic and legal subsystem are coupled by means of property law and the relevant 259 contracts, the political and legal subsystem by constitutional law, the economic and political subsystem by taxes, and so on. The second distinct type of social systems are direct interactions, in which communication is based on direct physical perception of the participants (face-to-face copresence), that is, senders and addressees (Chettiparamb 2020, 434–5; Seidl 2005, 38–9; Gren and Zierhofer 2003, 618, 625–6). It can be said that in this case the distinguishing binary code is presence/absence. Only those persons who are present (more precisely, considered present) influence communication in the interactive social system. During apair’s conversation on the street, only this couple is present, passers-by are considered absent. Interaction systems can be seen as asubstrate for functional systems. Metaphorically, it is conceivable that functional subsystems float in asea of ever-evolving and declining interaction systems. Great attention is paid by research to the third main type of social systems– organizations (organizational systems), which reproduce themselves based on decisions (Seidl 2005, 39–46; Gren and Zierhofer 2003, 626). The decision is defined as aspecific type of communication and is again attributed not to human beings, but to the social system– the organization. While normal communication communicates some content selected from the possible (“Ilove you”), decisions implicitly or explicitly state that other options may have been selected (“We will buy electronic publications [not printed books]”). The organization has specific initial assumptions for making decisions based on previous decisions, as well as programs or aplan. Each organizational system is connected to at least one functional subsystem, whose binary code and symbolic medium it uses. Organizational systems can therefore be considered to be anetwork of specialized communications and astructure of functionally specific decisions. Monophonic organizational systems are primarily tied to just one subsystem, and therefore have only one primary medium and coding for creating their program. However, this does not preclude them from being secondarily linked to other functional subsystems. Heterophonic organizational systems are equally tied to multiple functional subsystems and can use more media. This leads to conflicts of incomparable values and programs (Andersen and Born 2007, 176–7). Luhmann’s theory is based primarily on the description of developmental tendencies within modern society, which is characterized by asharp differentiation of social systems at the level of society, interaction and organization, as well as functional subsystems within society (Kühl 260 2020, 496; Drepper 2005). Acharacteristic of functional subsystems in modern society is open participation, because anyone can participate in their communication, the decisive factor is whether the communication corresponds to the binary code and program of the functional subsystem. The organization differs in that only communication concerning its members is relevant to them. Organizations are therefore defined not only by the type of communication (decision), but also by the people (membership). The modern organization itself decides on non-/membership and all persons are equal on entry (Kühl 2020, 499–500). An essential element of Luhmann’s concept is the fact that social systems– unlike physical things in space– are not mutually exclusive. This is because one and the same communication can be integrated into multiple social systems at the same time. It can belong to the interactive social system as well as the organization and the functional subsystem at the same time. Social systems of different types are thus nested or equally combine (Kühl 2020, 508–9; Luhmann 1982, 86). In terms of the relationship to people, it is conceivable that psychic systems run through asea of different systems, each with its own meaning, that is, the program and binary codes (Von Schlippe and Hermann 2013, 389). Luhmann’s classification of social systems seems to be open already at the level of the originally tripartite distinction of society, interaction and organizational systems. Many social phenomena of modern society are– at least on the analytical level– candidates for the expansion of social systems in the broad interval between society and interaction systems. [Fig. 3] Amodel example of the benefits of this approach is arecent study by Stefan Kühl, which defined the common and different features of organizations, movements, groups (of friends) and mono-functional families (Kühl 2020). From his point of view, all these social systems are connected by membership, but it is treated differently in each of them. There are also different forms of communication. Communication leading to taking adecision is typical for organizations, communication about values for amovement, personal communication for groups and intimate communication for monofunctional families. In the case of the family, it is possible to add that anything can be communicated, the content is not important, the communication itself is essential, as it deepens the affiliation and identity.3 All these social systems separated from society and at the same time from each other only with the crystallization of 3 See also Von Schlippe and Hermann 2013, 394–5. 261 afunctionally differentiated society. Similarly, it would be possible to deal with, for example, states, professional groups or religious communities. The abstract passages above can be concretized by at least one example, namely modern agriculture as asocial system (Casanova-Pérez et al. 2015). Agriculture can be perceived as apartial system of afunctional subsystem of the economy. Agriculture itself is not homogeneous, but consists of asubsistence and market production. The programme of agriculture is to satisfy the food and other material demands of human beings (Guptill and Peine 2021). Communication operations take place through language and include information contained in various documents relating to law, regulations, agreements, rules, instructions, and so on; its important part is also the collective memory and tradition. The social agricultural system is based on acontinuum of physical reality, which is conceptualized as an allopoietic agro-ecological system (Langthaler 2006). The link between agriculture and physical reality are psychic systems that are structurally coupled with them and at the same time are the drivers and controllers of changes in the physical agroecological system. [Fig. 4] The coevolution of the psychic systems and agriculture has resulted in specific structural adjustments. Both systems irritate each other. If irritation leads to achange in structure, we speak of resonance. Through the psychic systems, agriculture perceives the information from other communication systems that is compatible with its structure and vice versa. Selected information penetrates agriculture and participates in their autopoiesis (for example, information on prices, interest rates, punishments for illegal production, ecological conditions). Some resonances can stop autopoiesis. The system also knows self-irritation, that is, an internal conflict created by itself. An example is the traditional seasonal prophecies of weather (Mexican cabañuelas), which are part of the collective memory of psychic systems and, through structural coupling, enter the agricultural system, especially its subsistence branch. Every family household, farm and peasant community (that is, the organizational systems that comprise the infrastructure of agriculture) evaluates the irritation and self-irritation through its own communication operations, program and functional logic (each has adifferent farming style). Their resonances are therefore different. Thus, the stoppage of the autopoiesis of the organizational systems, recorded as the abandonment of some farms and land, has no determined, predictable and objectively explainable causes (Casanova-Pérez et al. 2015, 856–60, 862). The set of individual memories and expectations of the psychic systems is referred to as collective memory. It is aselected set of positive 262 and negative information within all the parts of the agricultural system. Each of them has adifferent memory. Through structural coupling, this information comes to the consciousness of the psychic systems and influences the ideas that lead to decisions about farming practices within the physical agroecological system. It is therefore perceived as amodel representing the physical effect of the autopoiesis of the psychic and indirectly the agricultural systems. What is important is that each part of the agricultural system as well as its organizational infrastructure in the form of farms is influenced by the current assessment of the self-/irritation and its own collective memory. Such aconception allows us to understand the seemingly contingent, irrational, complex and especially extremely variable behavior of agricultural producers in the past and today (Casanova-Pérez et al. 2015, 860–2). Luhmann’s theory of social systems is one of the important paradigmatic approaches in anumber of scientific areas, at the theoretical, methodological and analytical levels. It significantly shapes the contemporary sociology of law, economics, art, religion or education (summarized, for instance, by Berg and Schmidt 2000; Cadenas and Arnold 2015, 171–2). Its reception can also be observed in the historical sciences, although to aconsiderably uneven extent. What is significant is that Luhmann’s AGRICULTURE autopoietic/social system (collective memory) HUMAN BEING (psychic system coupled with living system) AGROECOLOGICAL allopoietic system operational closure operational closure selection and updating of information structural coupling Fig. 4: Links between the agricultural system/collective memory, human beings and the agroecological system (Casanova-Pérez et al. 2015, 861, modified). 263 theory offers aframework for grasping and explaining historical processes in away that allows for broad interdisciplinary interaction within the social sciences. In medieval studies, it seems attractive to follow the medieval beginnings of the functional differentiation of social systems (e.g.Pollack 2013; 2013a; 2015; Steckel 2013; Althoff 2013). There is also an attempt frequently to capture the formation of individual functional subsystems or the identification, description and explanation of the organizational systems (Hirschbiegel 2004; Becker et al. 2004; DvořáčkováMalá 2009; D’Avray 2017; Arlinghaus 2018; Popić 2019). Many of these studies are partly experimental in their character. The present study belongs to this current in order to show the compatibility of Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems with one of the main concepts of European historiography– the medieval transformation. 3 The Medieval Transformation on the Background of Luhmann’s Social Theory Historians and archaeologists point to afundamental transformation that affected all the spheres of medieval society. It was not asingular but along-term process gradually connecting social, economic and cultural changes, the sequence of which is an important subject of research. This transformation was not limited regionally but took place in all of the Latin parts of Europe, and it is even possible to say that it defined its boundaries (Bartlett 1993; Alfonso et al. 2007; Graham-Campbell and Valor et al. 2007; Kitsikopoulos 2010; Berend 2012). The development in the Czech lands was placed in the European-wide context particularly by Jan Klápště (1994; 2012; 2016), Josef Žemlička (1997; 2002) and others (Gringmuth-Dallmer and Klápšte et al. 2014). The broader social-theoretical starting points was only reflected on by J. Klápště, who had been inspired i.a. by the concept of the “mutation féodale / de l´an mil’ of French social history” (Barthélemy 1997; 2012). In the first cognitive step, we simplify the complex and chronologically diverse reality into the form of two contrasting images, of which one represents Czech society and the landscape around the year 1000 (Early Middle Ages) and the second circa 1300 (High Middle Ages) (Klápště 1994; 1994a; 2012). The Early Middle Ages was characterized by aunity of the power, religious and production spheres; the market and monetarized economy was almost non-existent on the local or regional level. Both agricultural and non-agricultural production had amore or 264 less subsistence character, while the surplus was exploited by the state power, which organized specialized production and services and also controlled long-distance trade (redistribution mechanism). There were no institutional towns in the Early Middle Ages. We only encounter settlement agglomerations, usually near administrative castles. Agrarian and non-agrarian production was not strictly separated, both of which can be found in approximately the same quality both in the countryside (scattered here) and in agglomerations near castles (concentrated here). Rural settlements were qualitatively similar to each other and it is not possible to observe amore significant hierarchy, which was also reflected in the fact that we assume own burial site for each settlement community. There was no network of parish churches in the rural areas, which were located in administrative castles and in the places of the residence of the duke. The social elites had not yet been separated from state power, which was materially reflected also in the fact that we find their divided residences only in agglomerations near administrative castles. The law was differentiated and tied to the individual social groups into which the individual entered by birth. In the High Middle Ages, we still find the power and production spheres together, but to some extent the market and monetized economies were already differentiated. Agricultural production was therefore dual in nature, that is, subsistence and market. Market non-agricultural production was tied to towns, only some necessary services remained in the countryside. It is therefore possible to speak of asharp separation of urban and rural areas, which, however, were also linked by market mechanisms. The countryside was permeated by ahierarchical network of settlements: hamlets– villages– parish villages– market villages. The class of direct landowners was separated from the state power, who leased most of the land in various legal frameworks, most often hereditary to the peasants. The residences of the landlords lay for the most part directly in the countryside. The network of available parish churches enabled the real Christianization of the country. Law took on partly aterritorial aspect and the individual acquired it on the basis of asubject relationship– the peasant by taking over the land (subject tenants) and the burgher by acquiring real estate in the town. It is possible to model very well the striking contrasts between the early and high medieval societies. However, controversies arise in the interpretation of the causalities of the medieval transformation. Older interpretations were based primarily on the testimony of the written sources, which evoked the appearance of asharp turn. As early as the 265 19th century, therefore, the idea appeared of wide areas of Central and Eastern Europe, which were only sparsely populated, with low economic productivity and outside the influence of first Ancient and later Franconian, or Byzantine world. In the course of the Early Middle Ages, state formations arose here, Christianity spread and the social elites were in close contact with the surrounding world, but this did not change the traditional social and economic structure, sometimes referred to as archaic or pre-feudal. The change, meaning developmental discontinuity, was only brought about by the migration of persons and the transfer of technological and organizational innovations from the second half of the 12th century. This straightforward and flat narrative, which envisages arevolutionary innovative package, is still accepted to this day especially in Anglo-Saxon literature (Melton 2015, 429–37; Berend, Urbanczyk and Wiszewski 2013, 408–9). In the case of the Czech lands, this idea was embodied in the concept of so-called German colonization and formulated in apolitically engaged form as part of the so-called Sudeten German historical paradigm.4 Alternative views, to some extent inspired by Marxism, questioned the causal role of the mere transfer of people, capital and innovative technologies, and instead sought an answer in the inevitable laws and determined trajectory of historical development. The emphasis was placed on changes in economic production and the subsequent changes in the social sphere. In this context, researchers orientated on asystems approach have highlighted the impact of climate change, demographic growth and advanced agrarian technologies (Klápště 1994, 9–28; Hatcher and Bailey 2001; Kitsikopoulos 2010). Archaeology has brought asignificant shift in understanding the causal connections of the medieval transformation, documenting the ongoing structural changes and at the same time finding innovations across Europe. All European regions have experienced, in principle, asimilar but in specific form adifferent social and economic transformation, where for acertain time they became an active zone of innovation. The driving force of the changes was not the contact of some center and the periphery, as neighbouring areas could develop side by side for along time without deeper influence, but the internal structural transformation that at acertain time allowed the reception of innovations and their further development. For instance, in the Czech lands (i)the early landed 4 On the historiography, see Leśniewska 2004; Žemlička 2003; 2012; Konrád 2011. 272 and spaces), material heterogeneity (nothing has only one, for instance, social dimension), topology (variable relations between objects and/or spaces) and performativity (objects and spaces mutually limit one another). This circle of references makes it possible to conceptualize space as aproduct, where spatial characteristics influence objects as well as social relations and characteristics. Fourth, with the help of actor-network theory, it is possible to connect spatiality and sociality with the concept of framed interaction. It says that every social interaction of human beings is realistically or virtually framed, or localized. It thus follows that social interactions are reduced to those that are possible in agiven context. Or, the number of potential social interactions is reduced by space. A. Koch presents the example of abuilding with the function of apost office, in which we will not deal with intimate problems with the post official. Based on this series of explanations and justifications, Koch gives the characteristics of spatial systems and suggests away to understand their relationship to social systems (Koch 2005, 6–12; Vis 2009, 120–1). Koch considers the spatial system to be an autopoietic, self-referential system that creates itself by distinction itself from its environments. Whereas social systems are created based on meaning insocial, temporal and functional dimensions, the spatial systems are based on the congruency of the geometric and topological dimensions and also fuzziness in ageocomputational sense. [Fig. 6] Communication in spatial systems is specific and consists of networks, places and locations. Or, aspatial system is created as aselection of anumber of networks, places, and locations, where, in this sense, the network includes the fullness of relations that exist during the communication process. Social systems create an environment for spatial systems and vice versa. Both systems are structurally coupled and observe and irritate one another. Koch also elaborated amodel of translation that describes the way in which autopoietic social and spatial systems can understand each other. Social Systems Spatial Systems Communication DimensionEvent Social Time Subject Geometry Topology Fuzziness CongruencyMeaning Fig. 6: Communication in social and spatial systems (Koch 2005, 7, modified). 273 Koch (2005, 7, 12) presents the example of the family as asocial system and the home as acoupling spatial system. For the emergence and existence of the social system of the family, it is necessary that it be coupled both with psychic systems and aspatial system. The spatial system of the home is further coupled with the physical house (an allopoietic architectonic system). The elements of the autopoietic spatial system are not the rooms or the garden, but the congruent interplay of their shapes (geometry), spatial relations (topology) and fuzziness. We imagine that many places in anetwork of rooms can accommodate social interaction, but only when this interaction takes place does location occur. And it is precisely the chaining of locations through networks and anumber of places that generates the spatial system of the home. The concept of structurally coupled social and spatial systems says that there is no direct and predictable relationship between them. There is no determined relationship between spatial and allopoietic (physical, architectonic) systems. Space has the role of areference framework for the social system. It is also true that social and spatial systems can be materially consolidated by the transformation of nature (Vis 2009, 125–6). Some of the paths thus close for archaeology others open. We cannot reconstruct society from the physical world (more precisely from its translation), but the empirical research of their coevolution and structural coupling is all the more exciting for that. Another promising way to approach space, materiality and corporeality was suggested by the Danish rural sociologists Egon Noe and Hugo F. Alrøe (2006; 2012). According to them, Luhmann’s set of autopoietic systems can be supplemented by afourth type– heterogeneous systems, represented by acomplex network of social, biological and technical relationships. Examples of autopoietic heterogeneous systems are farming systems. In the first step, it is once again necessary to start from the actor-network theory, according to which the system does not create the elements of the physical world (persons, things, buildings, land), but the way of their translation in the actor’s project. In the network, only some characteristics of mobilized physical entities are emphasized and developed. In other words, in the creation of afarming system, it is possible to choose from alarge number of persons, things, pieces of the landscape, organizations or institutions, and from the infinite possibilities of their translations, that is, the ways of their engagement in the system. The entities integrated into the farming system acquire their form and role through their relationships and interactions, so they are not directly determined by the characteristics of the real physical and 274 dynamic objects. An example is acow that each actor imagines differently (for instance, ahighly productive dairy cow in the concept of afarmer and abanking consultant, aclean cow in the concept of amilker, abeautiful cow in the concept of afarmer’s wife, ahappy organic cow in the concept of aconsumer, ahealthy cow in the concept of aveterinarian and so on). However, the actor-network theory does not solve the question of the system or network boundary, that is, what still belongs to it and what does not. It is precisely the theory of autopoietic systems that answers this question. The life and functioning of the system presuppose differentiation from the environment, that is, areduction of complexity. Determining the meaning, that is, the code of selection, in the case of afarming system acoherent production strategy (specialization) serves this purpose. Accordingly, entities from the physical world are integrated into the system and the method of their translation (mobilization) is determined. For the system not to collapse from an excess of possibilities, it must set the boundaries of what still makes sense to perceive. Therefore, each farming system builds its own subjective world, the central theme of communication, internal logic, and rationality. It determines its structure of expectations, the way it responds to external irritations and also the potential for structural coupling. The concept of heterogeneous autopoietic systems offers an alternative for empirical research and understanding of complex bodies composed of social, economic, technical and natural elements and interactions. In our case discussed above, the medieval family households and peasant holdings. In practice, we would prefer it to arelatively complex concept of coupled social and spatial systems. 5 Conclusion The theory of autopoietic social systems has the potential to connect historical sciences with the dynamic world of social sciences. The intersectional node is the desire to understand the principles of social change and the opportunity to influence its course in the future. Historians and archaeologists appreciate that it allows aliberation from deterministic views, the questioning of the predictable role of exogenous factors and the existence of one optimal solution. Belief in aone-sided chain of causalities, triggered by external forces, appears to be anaive delusion. Instead, the theory of autopoietic social systems offers us anumber of diverse perspectives explaining social diversity and the apparent 275 contingency of the trajectory of historical development. The concept that social systems persist even if their internal structure as well as the environment change radically is also attractive. Luhmann’s social systems can perceive one another, develop together, but the links between them are never direct. Each social system creates aspecific arena, where its own rules and values apply, which determine what enters it and what on the contrary does not. On an empirical level, therefore, we are tempted to observe the logic around which individual social systems, as autonomous entities, are constituted and reconstituted. Niklas Luhmann’s universal social theory remains open, is the subject of controversies, criticism and modification (e.g.Cadenas and Arnold 2015). So far, it is used primarily for synchronic social research, so in the form of an experiment we turned our attention to the deep past and tried to unravel the series convergent changes that European society and the Czech lands experienced in the medieval period. Significant changes have identified here in the ways of social differentiation, the distinction of new functional subsystems and profiling of the relevant organizational infrastructure, that is, the phenomena and processes characteristic of the entire Latin part of medieval Europe. Of course, development did not stop and we could continue with the social transformation on the threshold of the Early Modern Period, which, however, was of amarkedly divergent nature and divided Europe in the way we still experience today. Great potential can be seen for acomplex historical interpretation in the integration of materiality, spatiality and corporeality into the theory of autopoietic systems. We can be inspired, among other things, in social geography and rural sociology, where some researchers have combined the theory of autopoietic social systems with awell-established but seemingly opposite actor-network theory. Translated by Sean M. Miller. 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In The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, edited by Nora Berend, 237–70. Farnham: Routledge. 280 Participatory Sense-Making through Bodies: Self-Organizing Principles in the Continuity of Life and Mind Eva Lehečková and Jakub Jehlička He raised shape, the ordinary word, from everyday language use. Jiří Cieslar: Hlas deníku.1 Everything we do is astructural dance in the choreography of coexistence. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela: The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding 1 Introduction In his attempt to mediate the essence of the oeuvre created by Vladimír Boudník (the Czech graphic artist immortalized in Bohumil Hrabal’s works), film and literary critic Jiří Cieslar assumes that it was the shape that Boudník had placed at the center of his universe, profiling it as prominent not only to himself but also, with equal importance, to others in the world. For Boudník the shape is not astatic, pleasing composition of lines. Rather it is aproduct of physically challenging creative action, where the outcome exhales the energy put into its creation. Under the rubric of Explosionism, Boudník conceived his action graphics as aparticipatory sense-making, enactive process, supported by his belief in 1 “Tvar, to obyčejné slovo, zdvihl zběžného jazykového užívání.” Jiří Cieslar’s reference from his Journal Pages on Czech graphic artist Vladimír Boudník. 281 the creative force in every human being. The ultimate potential of such an enactive art form was the “positive reshaping of human society”,2 manifested through situated, individual explosive moments of awe vis à vis art. Cieslar’s phrasing is congenial in that it relates shape to the world-changing action of raising it from everyday life to an extraordinary and unique experience, showing that language and action are two facets of one and the same reality. With respect to Boudník, it is particularly useful to observe how his artistic and personal uniqueness ossifies over time through asort of cult-building in the memories shared by his peers and Hrabal’s novels, alongside critical reflections of his work. It is in this context that Cieslar longs for the sedimented patina to be stripped away, that we might touch upon the authentic self of the artist. It this study, we address the “structural dance in the choreography of coexistence” (Maturana and Varela 1992, 248). While not taking this quote as purely metaphorical, we examine the enactive potential of hands in literal motion in two contexts: in contemporary performances of the noted romantic ballet d’action Giselle, and in the way that co-speech gestures are manifested in spontaneous everyday interactions. We elaborate on the tension between the conventional and the extraordinary in these situations, and how the perceiver of the action contributes to their assessment as such through the loop of participatory sense-making by bodies. 2 From Embodied Mind to Intercorporeality The kinship of body and language in the context of social semiotic processes has long been recognized. This is manifested, inter alia, by atendency to subsume both under acommon denominator. However, this recognition can mean two different things: either we appreciate the gestural potential in any communicative behavior (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Goodwin 2000), or we adhere to the inverse position: Language itself, that infinitely unstable entity which expands and contracts under our very eyes as we attempt to pin it down, now causing us to conclude that there is nothing– gestures, commodities, sex, eating– which is not essentially language to its very core.3 (Jameson 1974, 536) 2 For the basic information about Boudník’s work see e.g.https://www.artlist.cz/en/vladimir -boudnik-101681/. 3 Cited by Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018, 107. 288 aplethora of quintessential romantic motives– frank villagers confronted with cultured, yet heartless aristocracy, living bodies succumbing to supernatural creatures, betrayal, madness and death and, above all, love so deep that it gives the power to save life and overcome adeadly curse. Like other French ballets of this period, including Le Corsaire and La fille mal gardée, the final version of the dance script for Giselle, dating back to 1884, comes from the ballet icon of the second half of the 19th century, Marius Petipa. Petipa, although of French origin, built adecades-long career as ballet master and choreographer for Imperial Ballet Theatres in Russia. In order to enrich the local ballet repertoire, he introduced new versions of French romantic ballets, which, premiered in Opéra de Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, experienced asubsequent gap in staging not only in Paris but throughout Europe. Thus, by staging them in Russia, Petipa contributed significantly to keeping these pieces in cognizance across generations and stimulating their reintroduction to Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Petipa’s creditable agenda nevertheless has its problematic side as well, sometimes called Petipa’s problem (Smith 2010).9 His versions represent the dominant interpretation of these masterworks of romanticism, without explicitly addressing the extent and nature of modifications to the original dance script undertaken in order to better suit the ballets to Petipa’s contemporaries adhering to the more classical ballet style of the end of the 19th century. Consequently, the blasting influence of Petipa’s choreographic stardom might obscure insight into the staging developments of romantic ballets throughout the 19th century as well as aproper assessment of Petipa’s contribution. In the case of Giselle, the influence of Petipa on the choreography was until recently unanimously believed to be substantial (Krasovskaya 1998). However, anewly discovered manuscript of the dance script of Giselle from the 1860s, created by the choreographer Henri Justamant and published in 2008, allowed us to trace the changes in the script from the original 1841 version as well as in the subsequent Petipa version. Surprisingly, many aspects of the so-called definitive version by Petipa believed to be his inventions (for instance, numerous dance formations of circles, half-circles and crosses) occur in Justamant’s manuscript as well. The overall shift from Justamant to Petipa, on the other hand, consists of areduction in the dramatic scenes without dance, i.e.those employing pantomime (e.g.the original intro of the second act consisting of 9 Smith refers to Collins 2009. 289 non-dancing interactions between hunters from Albrecht’s suite) to narrate through dance scenes. This finding puts the alleged radicality of Petipa’s modifications into perspective and allows asubtler assessment of the development of the script between the original, the 1860s and Petipa’s productions. Whatever the true nature of Petipa’s contribution to the dance script of Giselle, it still constitutes an obligatory starting point for all contemporary classical ballet productions, along-preserved and repeatedly confirmed canon. The sedimented experience of generations of both the producers and performers on one side and the audience on the other leads to amutual consent on Giselle as an artefact and sets up an expectation underlying every subsequent production of the ballet. The strong foundation of Petipa’s version for Giselle’s production offers aconvenient opportunity to ask afocal question of this chapter: under the given circumstances, how can anovel experience be evoked? What possibility for innovation and creativity lies within the canon, and how can it be ignited? To address these questions, we will take into consideration the ways of interpreting the first part of the second act from two productions of Giselle. Namely, we will compare two productions of the Royal Ballet in London, the first from 2006, starring the phenomenal ballet couple Alina Cojocaru and Johann Kobborg, the second from 2014, introducing the Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova in her debut at the Royal Ballet paired with principal dancer Carlos Acosta, who retired two years later. Although both were based on Peter Wright’s renowned 1960s production, the two performances differ remarkably in how Giselle is portrayed. Giselle is aballet of aheroine’s transformation, signified by the shift in scenery and atmosphere between the two acts: the first act, set in Giselle’s native village, tells the story of anaïve girl who falls for the pleasure-seeking count Albrecht, the subsequent revelation of Albrecht’s origin, and an aristocratic wedding announcement leading to Giselle’s madness followed by afatal failure of her fragile heart. Petipa’s beginning of the second act introduces the supernatural forest beings– the Wilis– with Myrtha as their leader, whose unearthly beauty lures young men into adance trance where they either find death from exhaustion or, if still alive, are drowned by the Wilis in alake. Myrtha raises Giselle’s corpse from her grave at the edge of the forest to turn her into aWili.10 10 The atypical location of Giselle’s grave (outside the village graveyard) alongside the particularly cruel demeanour of the Wilis are often interpreted as implicit signs of the fact that only fallen girls betrayed by their lovers could be turned into Wilis. 290 Contrary to the rules of the supernatural world, Giselle, who is forced to dance with Albrecht, mourning on her grave, fiercely fights her tragic malediction by rejecting avindictive manner, reviving her human love for Albrecht in her undead corpse and thus breaking the curse of the Wilis at the break of dawn, saving his life and earning herself areturn to apeaceful rest in her grave. Dancing Giselle, hence, necessitates depiction of the heroine at all three stages of her life (from loving apeasant to alover driven mad by betrayal and then to aWili fighting her tragic destiny in the name of love) and making the transitions believable. It is the second transition that we focus on in the comparison of the two productions from the Royal Ballet. Alina Cojocaru as Giselle turned into aWili accentuates the ethereal quality of the heroine through superb execution of limb movements precise both in timing and extension. It is controlled and effortless at the same time. Lines are soft and transitions smooth. This is aWili that ayoung hunter can fall madly in love with at first sight because he has never seen anything of such fineness in the world of the living. This, in fact, is aWili that the classical ballet audience is used to seeing across different staging, as confirmed by the performance DVD review by Margarida Bota Bull: “There is nothing new or revolutionary about this Giselle”, but it is “abeautiful production, superbly danced”.11 What we are allowed to be beguiled by is the beauty and technical superiority of the execution. As mentioned above, the step sequences in both performances, based on Petipa and Peter Wright, are the same. And still, Osipova succeeds in deconstructing the conventional image of Giselle. As if she had dismantled the dance flow into individual components and put them back together in the proper order, but with adifferent impact on the audience. The audience perceives her Giselle, seen athousand times before, as if for the first time. An experienced ballet-goer would expect that “there’d be nothing left to say” in Giselle, and yet, what he/she gets is “the most radical [Giselle] I’ve ever seen” (Anderson 2014). And like the small child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about the emperor’s new clothes, they find themselves pointing at the heroine in bewilderment and shouting: “Look, she is undead!” Where does the opportunity for Osipova to divert her interpretation from common expectations come from, and to what effect? As the bodily 11 http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/Nov08/Adam_Giselle_oa0993d.htm. Accessed 15 May 2021. 291 and, more specifically, limb movements are given, the few things available for modification are timing, range of motion and head and limb orientation. Although the precise differences in the timing of the ballerina’s dancing in the second act, for instance in the second-act pas-de-deux, is yet to be measured, what matters here is the effect that Osipova evokes through her dancing– and she looks as if she is dancing according to Fig. 1a: Osipova and Acosta in Act II of Giselle (still from a performance record, modified). Fig. 1b: Osipova and Acosta in Act II of Giselle (still from a performance record, modified). 292 some otherworldly tempo unfamiliar to humans. She uses her extraordinary strength and range of motion, in jumps as well as extensions, alongside her typical Russian style of arm work, to embrace the eeriness of the Wili she has been turned into. In so doing, she makes the macabreness of the transitional phase of apeasant into aWili stand out. By delivering slow jumps of extreme height and by extending her limbs and head at cadaverous angles (both in her solos and in duets with Acosta), Osipova suppresses the superficial prettiness of the Wilis so as to profile their true, nightmarish nature. [Fig. 1a and 1b] In these moments, Osipova dances as if the inner feeling of having become aWili is almost unbearable to herself, captivatingly translating this emotion to the audience. In this execution, Giselle is agenuine post-mortem suffering creature. In her dancing, she exhales the dolorous journey she was forced to take. She creates the impression that she is facing an inevitable tragic end: hunting down men for all eternity after dancing Albrecht to death. And it is only in contrast with the materialized destiny of Giselle through Osipova’s dancing that we can appreciate the positive effect of forgiveness and sacrifice for love that follows as aheart-breaking outcome of the narration. By showing us aGiselle who is ugly and macabre, Osipova has made us understand what evil disguised in ethereal glory her Giselle had to fight in order to win Albrecht’s life and her yearned-for requiescat in pace. It is only this perspective, invoked by Osipova’s intercorporeal relating to the destiny of her heroine as well as to the audience, which can show that by standing for Albrecht, in spite of his betrayal, she becomes atrue heroine, active and game-changing. Yet the radicality of Osipova’s interpretation is not absolute, but relative, tightly bound both to the storyline and the sedimented experience of past productions. As for the former, she builds the development of her heroine on purely logical relations: Giselle’s fragile heart in her human life symbolizes an extraordinary, almost supernatural strength of the heart on the abstract, emotional level. Sweet and cordial in her earthly life, she was not naturally inclined to embrace the prospects of the ghostly afterlife. Osipova’s Giselle-Willi is born of the same source as one of the numerous incarnations of Ophelia from Hamlet, namely, the one performed by Hana Kvapilová and eloquently praised by the Czech decadent poet and critic Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic: Rather than the fragrance of freshly picked violets, she radiated the paleness of the cemetery roses. Her madness did not lie in the confusion of the betrayed young heart, but in the experience of seeing through the 293 vanity of life and love. The most tragic Ophelia Ihave ever seen, she was not only let down by Hamlet, she was betrayed by everything, she was not only mad with herself, but with being in general. For “we know what we are but know not what we may be…”.12 (Karásek ze Lvovic 1927, 173) As for the latter, Osipova profiles her novel interpretation of Giselle-Wili in relation to the conventional depiction to which she, naturally, owes much. Only through mixing well-known pieces of the choreography with innovative bodily movement execution here and there are the shared expectations of the audience challenged, and the extraordinary can be raised from everyday life: We notice that the mechanicality present in the formation of habit by repetition is not only regressive in nature, like “dead leaves floating on the surface of the human soul” (Bergson, 1994, Laughter), it is also progressive, enabling motion relative to what is and has to be static […]. The withering is never meaningful by itself, it becomes meaningful through its reviving function.13 (Kolman 2020, 164) Osipova’s interpretation of Giselle is more on the gothic side of romanticism, sending unsettling shivers down the audience’s spine. While it may constitute arelatable aesthetic to the present-day audience, it is by no means anew facet in Giselle. In fact, the gothic aspects were acknowledged as early as in the original 1840s productions, inhibited only later, for instance among 1940s and 1950s British critics, in order to promote the ballet as romantic, i.e.devoid of the traces of popular culture (Morris 2017).14 On the whole, what we encounter in Osipova’s interpretation is asophisticated balance between conventionality and creative innovation, the latter stemming from close examination of the inner logic of 12 Vyzařovala více bledosti hřbitovních růží než vonnou vlhkostí právě utržených fialek. Její šílení nebylo zmateností oklamaného mladého srdce, ale vědomím zkušeně prohlédnuté marnosti všeho, života ilásky. Nejtragičtější Ofelie, již jsem kdy viděl: nebyla zklamána jen Hamletem, ale byla podvedena vším, nešílila jen nad sebou, ale nad bytím vůbec. Neboť “víme, co jsme, ale nevíme, co znás bude…” 13 Zároveň si všímáme, že mechaničnost něčeho, jak je přítomna vutváření zvyku skrze opakování, nemá jen regresivní povahu, jako “suché listí na hladině lidské duše” (Bergson, 1994, Smích), ale ipovahu progresivní, jež umožňuje pohyb jako relativní vůči tomu, co je amusí být nehybné. […] dané umrtvení nemá svůj smysl nikdy osobě, ale právě voné oživující funkci. 14 The fruitful interaction between the gothic aesthetic and the world of romantic ballet can be further supported by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s influence on the librettos of the ballets such as Nutcracker and Coppélia. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]